The impact of port throughput on local employment: Evidence from a panel of European regions

In this paper we study the impact of port activities on local employment by analyzing a sample of about 560 regions located in ten West European countries and observed over the period 2000-2006. The biggest European ports of OECD countries belong to our sample, which includes 116 ports. The empirical analysis is based on the estimation of a set of employment equations with the GMM-System estimator of Blundell and Bond (1998) that allows us to take into account persistence effects in employment, regional unobserved time-invariant heterogeneity, and endogeneity of port activity. Our main findings can be summarized as follows: first, regional employment is positively correlated to port throughput, while the number of passengers is not; in second place, we found a higher impact of port throughput when the liquid bulk is considered only for 10% of its weight; third, our main results are confirmed if we consider service and manufacturing employment instead of total employment. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.