Identifying the macroeconomic factors influencing country’s container throughputs:

Political and economic changes in Central and Eastern Europe, such as the fall of the Wall in 1989, the enlargement of the European Union in 2004, have affected recent conditions for development of transport and trade in Europe. In addition, the containerization, the increasing size of container vessels and other maritime patterns have strengthened these changes and have enabled efficient transportation of goods with low shipping and handling costs. Recently these patterns also relate to the smaller ports, which until now were not acknowledged as global players. The focus of this thesis lies on investigating whether the economic development and its components of the Central and East European (CEE) countries had an impact on the port development and the increased container traffic of their ports. The aim primarily lies on the Baltic countries, more precisely on Polish ports in the Bay of Gdansk. The shift-share analysis used in this study examines the European container ports’ dynamics with the eventual goal to identify to what extent the Baltic countries have managed to attract container volumes from the overall growth in the European industry.