Inland accessibility and foreland specialization of European regions

This paper investigates the relationship between containerized transport supply, measured by the number of weekly services, and inland accessibility at subnational revel. It employs Automatic Identification System (AIS) vessel tracking data to estimate the number of maritime services to main overseas markets, and Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression analysis to investigate its relationship with inland accessibility. The results show that maritime services with East and South Asia are particularly concentrated at ports with higher levels of inland accessibility. Other variations in maritime services, which are not related to inland accessibility, are attributable to transhipment strategies of shipping companies, economic niches of peripheral regions, and to competition with other modes of transport.