Load Centres in the Mediterranean Port Range. Ports Hub and Ports Gateway 40th Congress of the European Regional Science Association 29 August-1 September 2000 in Barcelona

The growing progression in the use of containers as standardized charge unity in maritim transport and the tecnological revolution associated to this has involved deep changes in the nature of interport competition. At first, the concept of Hinterland is becoming obsolete because the use of containers provide the intermodality and so remove monopolistic position of ports in his next influence area. Adjoint to this, interport competition is not focused, however, exclusively in enlarging the next influence area and more and more it has to do with his function of transhipment, that is, attracting the throughput with origin or destination to another port. Shippers organize container througtput by means of Round-The-World services which reasoning lie in using huge ships paying of call in a few strategic ports where transhipments are done from/to ports of origin or destination ports through feeder ships(with a moderate size). The upshot of all that is growing concentration of container througput in a few intermodal launchs and the configuration of a very competitive environment in the regional port systems. The purpose of this paper is analysing the impact of tecnological, economic and spatial changes associated to the introduction of containers in maritime transport in the Mediterrean Port Range. In particular, competition among main Mediterranean ports for becoming the dominant port of the system, called Load centers, is analysed. For this, the concept of Load Center is specified distinguishing between the Hub or Gateway strategy, and a concentration and competitive position analysis of main Mediterranean ports in the period 1990-1998 is done. The concentration analysis is undertaken trough the use of Gini and Hirshman-Herfindahl indexs and the Lorenz Curve, whereas the study of competitive position is done from the Shift-Share analysis.