Notably, the current challenges faced by East Asia’s main hub ports such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Kaohsiung (Taiwan), and Busan (South Korea) are believed to have put in question their supremacy over their emerging competitors within and outside national boundaries. The extent to which internal (e.g. congestion, rising costs, lack of space for further expansion) and external threats (i.e. competition) truly resulted in a different network hierarchy is worth analyzing and has not yet been demonstrated.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews recent literature on port competition, insisting on the rarity of – and potential for – conventional network analysis applied to maritime networks using data on vessel movements. Main results in section 3 relate changes in network structure and ports’ centrality (1996-2006) with observations obtained from recent literature and field work. The last section 4 concludes on the implications of the results for port policy and further analysis of maritime networks.