Session CD1: Maritime Economics and Business

• The Silk Road Economic Belt and Maritime Silk Road (OBOR initiative) have motivated many Chinese enterprises to make global investments, especially in the international cooperation of infrastructure construction. In light of this phenomenon, the authors have established a stylised game theoretic model that incorporates firm and bank decisions.
  
  
• Chinese overseas investment (COI) not only includes capital investment, but also the export of other factors of input, such as steel, cement and many other types of construction materials. To investigate the impacts of COI on the OBOR countries, the authors of the second study have collected data on Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) and other economic data required for social economic accounting. Based on the collected data, the authors have created a Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) with individual items that show the Chinese FDI and inventories in the Chinese industrial sector. By using the SAM, the authors have also set up a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model.
  
  
• One important consideration of the OBOR initiative is to increase energy security and environment protection for China. This is generally in line with China’s plan to increase the diversification of the energy sources and types, and transport routes. Under this plan, the share of natural gas consumption will be increased to 10% of the total energy consumption by the end of 2020, which will substantially drive the growth of natural gas imports. The third study therefore first provides an analysis on the current state of China’s consumption and importation of natural gas, and then examines the current and prospective import routes, i.e., pipelines (Central Asia Gas Pipeline and Sino-Myanmar pipeline) and sea transportation of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Last, the study forecasts the impact of the Central Asia Gas Pipeline and Sino-Myanmar pipeline on the LNG shipping market by using time-series data from 2005 to 2014. The full capacities of the two pipelines are 680 billion cubic meters (BCM), which means that the shipping capacity of LNG will be increased by 12.14% compared to 2014 after the two pipelines are fully utilised. By adopting a log-liner regression model, the carrier rate of LNG is expected to decrease by 25.76% without considering the impact of other factors. This study can be useful for further market planning and forecasting of LNG.
  
  
• The aim of the third study is to investigate the economic feasibility of several selected China-Europe freight train routes, evaluate their comprehensive cost under regular operations, calculate the input-output of local financial subsidies and furthermore ascertain the rationality of local financial subsidies. With these results, this study then forecasts the trend of cost changes and its potential development in the future. Some suggestions will be provided in the last part with the above analysis.
  
  

• Connectivity development is a high priority in the OBOR initiative, which requires the rapid development and application of freight rail in multimodal transportation. To promote the competitiveness of multimodal facilities, local governments are exploring the subsidisation of the containers that use their multimodal facilities for imports and exports. The first study therefore addresses the following questions: Could subsidy policies achieve their original goal to maximise total social benefits? Are these consistent with the requirements of multimodal transportation development under the new opening market characterised by the government-orientated investment abroad in the OBOR? Are these also optimal from the perspective of the central government for maximising social welfare?
  
  
• With the launch of the OBOR strategy, eight Chinese cities successively announced that they would offer direct railway container services to inland European cities. Against this background, the second study presents a geographic information system (GIS)-based multi-criteria decision analysis to evaluate the emerging new container transport routes between China and Europe with the traditional routes. The criteria include factors such as transport costs, transport distance and time, air emission, and infrastructure and policy impacts. This study makes an initial and preliminary attempt to demonstrate whether the emerging container transport routes between Asia and Europe will better meet the needs of carriers and the public sector.
  
  
• The OBOR initiative has higher requirements for the development of container intermodal transport. The third study thus evaluates the social and economic effects on carriers and ports from the potential changes in the container intermodal transport in China under the OBOR initiative, with a specific focus on energy consumption and carbon emission. A multi-objective dynamic optimisation model is built to minimise transport time, cost, energy consumption and also carbon emission.