The Performance of Seaport Clusters - RePub - Erasmus Universiteit ...

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The Performance of Seaport Clusters
processes that take place in seaports. Slack was the first scholar to pay attention to location
decisions of the port service industry. He shows that physical proximity to the terminals
becomes less important for the port service industry (Slack 1988). Van Klink (1995) explains
the decline of employment in ports by the relocation of logistics activities 59 . He terms this
process ‘maritime deconcentration’.
The cluster approach has hardly been used to analyze ports. Perhaps the best quantitative
port cluster study is the annually repeated study of Antwerp’s port cluster, by the Bank of
Belgium. In this study, a cluster population of about 1000 firms, including logistics and
industrial firms is identified. The development of the value added of this cluster is calculated.
However, this study does not explain the performance of cluster.
Haezendonck (2001) is the first scholar who uses the term ‘port cluster’ and draws from
cluster theories. She defines a port cluster as ‘the set of interdependent firms engaged in
port related activities, located within the same port region and possibly with similar strategies
leading to competitive advantage and characterized by a joint competitive position vis-à-vis
the environment external to the cluster’ (Haezendonck, 2001, p. 136).
Haezendonck analyzes the performance of a port cluster with an adapted version of Porter’s
diamond framework (Porter, 1990, Rugman et al, 1995). She identifies 14 factors that
influence the competitiveness of seaports, including internal competition, internal
cooperation, client relationships in the cluster, the presence of related and supporting
industries and the behavior of (different levels of) the government. This study is a major
contribution to understanding port clusters, but has the following shortcomings:
• The issue of identifying firms in the cluster is not addressed. This is relevant since the
question of what actually is a port cluster is still unclear.
• A focus on two commodity groups: containers and breakbulk. An analysis of the
competitiveness of a complete port cluster is still lacking.
59 Van Klink’s work is a shift towards analyzing ports as clusters of economic activities, but he
does not use the term cluster, or the literature on clusters. The same is true for Winkelmans
(1984). His work can be regarded as a port cluster study ‘avant la lettre’.