Assessment of maritime transport sector attractiveness on the Eastern coast of Baltic sea

Abstract

Globalization of supply chain and increasing the emergency of international trade conditions influence the complexity of aritime attractiveness because a big number of different factors are related within the decision making of seaport selection from the point of view of seaport stakeholders. Theoretical findings justified the strong relationship between seaport governance and maritime transport attractiveness, and a lot of researches in the area of seaport governance was done, but the researches of maritime transport sector attractiveness were usually fragmented and based on the sectorial attractiveness assessment. The idea of this research is to collect as much as possible maritime transport attractiveness factors into one set, to find the weighted attractiveness index for the different seaports working in the same or in the different regions, and to compare them. The scientific achievement of this research is specific index calculation and visualisation methodology, based on the combined AHP- GRA methods, which were applied to compare the maritime transport attractiveness in the region of Eastern coast of Baltic sea. The research results found out that the maritime transport attractiveness index could be calculated as the the aggregate function of seaport authority performance, seaport performance and seaport connectivity, and the most attractive maritime transport sector is formed by the Tallinn seaport governance.