Ports as sources of prosperity for their cities

摘要

Most large ports are located in cities and the majority of the largest world cities are port-cities. However, port-cities remain fairly unexplored in academic research. There is an ocean of studies on cities; for ports this would be a lake, for port-cities a pool. The knowledge on port-cities is fragmented and specific rather than comprehensive and comparative, and in most cases not policy-relevant, a few exceptions aside. That is the reason why we at the OECD have created the port-cities programme and taken up the challenge to come up with a comparative assessment of port-cities: their performance, the impacts of ports on their territory, and port-city policies that have worked to increase the positive effects. A synthesis report with our main conclusions will be released in September 2013, some of our main findings are revealed here.