A robust ranking of maritime connectivity: revisiting UNCTAD’s liner shipping connectivity index (LSCI)

Vikas Kumar Mishra, Bapi Dutta, Mark Goh, José Rui Figueira, Salvatore Greco

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

11 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Maritime connectivity is becoming increasingly important due to its inextricable relation to maritime trade, especially in the global economy. This paper presents a robust framework to rank countries on their maritime connectivity. Typically, in most index creation models, the arithmetic mean is used to build a composite index. In this paper, we propose a more reliable ranking approach, by applying the method of stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis (SMAA). In this, we take into account the variability in the weights assigned to the connectivity factors, thus producing a probabilistic ranking for each country (i.e., the probability to achieve a certain rank). UNCTAD’s ranking, based simply on the arithmetic mean, where all the weights are equal, becomes a special case of our approach. Our results show that China achieves the highest level of connectivity, followed by Singapore.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)424-443
Number of pages20
JournalMaritime Economics & Logistics
Volume23
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Feb 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Acknowledgements V.K.M. thanks Dr. Jan Hoffmann, Chief of UNCTAD\u2019s Trade Logistics Branch for providing the necessary data to carry out this research and for several fruitful discussions during the preparation of this article. The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, Editor Dr. Hoffmann, and Editor in Chief Prof. Haralambides for their constructive comments that led to improvements in the quality and presentation of the paper. JRF acknowledges the support from the FCT grant SFRH/ BSAB/139892/2018 under the POCH Program. VKM acknowledges the support from the Fond for Scientific Research Vlaanderen (FWO) projects G028015N and G090117N and the FNRS-FWO under Excellence of Science (EOS) project no. 30468160 \u201CStructured low-rank matrix/tensor approximation: numerical optimization-based algorithms and applications\u201D.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited part of Springer Nature.

Keywords

  • Maritime connectivity
  • Stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis (SMAA)
  • Composite index
  • Liner shipping connectivity index

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