Do economic growth and seaport throughput move together in port cities?

Most previous investigations in the literature only pay attention to the unidirectional causal link from seaport throughput to port city economic growth or whether the development of a port city stimulates seaport throughput. Using a sample of 15 East Asian port cities from 4 East Asian economies between 2000 and 2014, this paper employs panel co-integration techniques to quantitatively investigate the co-movement relationships between seaport throughput and the economic development of port cities, shedding further light on the precise role that seaport throughput has in port city economic development. The estimation results support the cointegrated relationship and confirm the existence of co-movement between seaport throughput and port city economic growth. The panel fully modified ordinary least squares estimation and dynamic ordinary least squares also indicate that seaport throughput positively impacts economic growth. This evidence highlights the important role of marine transportation and seaport development, which is consistent with previous findings in the literature; however, relatively few studies investigate whether there exists a bi-directional relationship between economic growth and seaport throughput in East Asian port cities. Our empirical findings offer important policy implications for the sample port cities.