THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON SEABORNE TRADE CONNECTIVITY: EVIDENCE FROM THE GREECE-CENTERED NETWORK OF CONTAINERSHIP MOVEMENTS
THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON SEABORNE TRADE CONNECTIVITY: EVIDENCE FROM THE GREECE-CENTERED NETWORK OF CONTAINERSHIP MOVEMENTS

Summary/Abstract: Maritime transportation is regarded as the backbone of global trade, and container shipping as a major driver of globalization. The shock of COVID-19 pandemic had unprecedented adverse effects on the operation of container shipping industry. This paper investigates a multitude of these effects focusing on their network dimension. It exploits the ConTraffic database covering about 2,494,606 containership movements between Greek and non-EU ports during the period 2017-2022 to construct a Greece-centered global matrix of container shipping flows. The use of an advanced spatial network analytics framework, combining pattern recognition, community detection and decomposition methods, allows discerning several unique features of the container shipping markets, such as the relatively stable hub position of countries and trade flow imbalances between East and West. It further signifies the multiple scaling impacts of the pandemic shock on the container shipping connectivity at the country origin-destination level. The findings facilitate the identification of a few maritime trade communities among countries, with structurally resilient composition for the buyers’ network between the two (pre- and during-pandemic) periods, albeit the reduction in the number of communities, increased regionalization, expanded spatial scope and weakened centrality and hierarchy. Conversely, the sellers’ network shows reduced hub dependence, increased concentration and contracted spatial scope. The results help to evaluate the redistributed roles among countries as suppliers or buyers and new, emerging country hubs in the container shipping network, thus offering wider implications for the strategic and resilient (re)organization of the network connectivity in the post-pandemic era.

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