Economies of scale in Greek coastal shipping. A survivor analysis

Abstract

Although Greek coastal shipping is a very important shipping industry, there are not a lot of scientific efforts calculating economies of scale and minimum optimal firm size in the past. In our opinion, Stigler’s survivor technique is the best-fitted method for researching these issues. It examines the configuration of companies’ sizes over time and argues that only the companies with the lowest long-term average costs will survive in a market. Methodologically, we divided coastal companies into size classes regarding the number of employees per company and the contribution of companies per size class to gross production value, gross added value, and revenue without vat. Then we checked the statistical significance of changes in market share distribution. The analysis led to the conclusion that economies of scale exist in Greek coastal shipping and the minimum firm size pertains to the employment of 20-49 employees or the operation of two ships per shipping company.

A short-sea-shipping system for Liguria coast: first analysis at local, regional and cross-border scale

“…As already addressed by other scholars in European Transport Journal (Sitzimis, 2022;Carlucci et al, 2020), main competitive point of the service is the attractiveness of towards users -due to the beauty of the coast-, but which has only a marginal impact on saving costs in producing the service. Nevertheless, according to international, EU and national goals, the need to support multi-modality through sustainable mobility options able to ease urban traffic congestion and to create more resilient and modular transport system, suggests to investigate similar solutions.…”

Forecasting methods in Greek coastal shipping: The case of Southwest Crete

“…The last six (6) ports concern southwestern Crete, while there are also two (2) smaller ones, Plakias and Agia Galini, recording consistently lower demand. In Crete, as well as throughout GCS, strong seasonality occurs during the summer months (third quarter of the year), with percentages frequently exceeding 50% [3][4][5][16][17][18]. The central ports of Heraklion (43.98%), Souda (43.16%), and Rethymno (48.13%) stand out since they connect Crete with Piraeus and have traffic that is not exclusively made up of tourists.…”