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This paper aims to explore one question: to what extent does urban rehabilitation impact the housing search cost of the low-income tenants.

This paper adopts the fixed effects time-on-market (TOM) model and pricing model to study the research question.

Urban rehabilitation lifts the subdivided units (SDUs’) prices by around 7%. For the SDU located in old districts, urban rehabilitation gives rise to the rental price up by 11%–12%. The SDUs in the area without urban rehabilitation experience a short marketing period of 16%–17%. The SDU located in the old district that is without urban rehabilitation would have a short marketing time.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the pioneering research to investigate the relationship between rehabilitation and low-income rental housing from the improved search theory. The improved search theory posits that under the circumstance of urban rehabilitation, low-income tenants’ options are limited and the search behavior will be restricted in the affordable areas, and then TOM will be shortened. With the concentration of SDUs in Hong Kong, the test of the search theory is broken down into two hypotheses. (H1) Urban rehabilitation leads to low-income housing prices increase. (H2) Low-income housing located in areas without urban rehabilitation has a shorter TOM.

This paper aims to forecast inbound and outbound container throughput for Bangkok Port to 2041 and uses the results to inform the future planning and management of the port’s container terminal.

The data used cover a period of 16 years (192 months of observations). Data sources include the Bank of Thailand and the Energy Policy and Planning Office. Cause-and-effect forecasting is adopted for predicting future container throughput by using a vector error correction model (VECM).

Forecasting future container throughput in Bangkok Port will benefit port planning. Various economic factors affect the volume of both inbound and outbound containers through the port. Three cases (scenarios) of container terminal expansion are analyzed and assessed, on the basis of which an optimal scenario is identified.

The economic characteristics of Thailand differ from those of other countries/jurisdictions, such as the USA, the EU, Japan, China, Malaysia and Indonesia, and optimal terminal expansion scenarios may therefore differ from that identified in this study. In addition, six particular countries/jurisdictions are the dominant trading partners of Thailand, but these main trading partners may change in the future.

There are only two major projects that have forecast container throughput volumes for Bangkok Port. The first project, by the Japan International Cooperation Agency, applied both the trend of cargo volumes and the relationship of volumes with economic indices such as population and gross domestic product. The second project, by the Port Authority of Thailand, applied a moving average method to forecast the number of containers. Other authors have used time-series forecasting. Here, the authors apply a VECM to forecast the future container throughput of Bangkok Port.

This study aims to investigate the efficiency changes of 23 major Asian container ports for the period from 2000 to 2007. In addition to assess the general trend, it also attempts to decompose the overall efficiency change into technological efficiency change, technical efficiency change and scale efficiency change to help port authorities to devise operational strategies.

The Malmquist index method is used, which is derived from data envelopment analysis. In this model, technological improvement comes from using state-of-the-art technologies, technical improvement is from rationalizing of port inputs and scale efficiency is from adjustment of port operational scales.

On average, the investigated ports have improved their efficiencies by 14.3 per cent. Such efficiency gains can be attributed to a 41 per cent increase in pure technical efficiency, a 47.5 per cent increase in scale efficiency and a 30.5 per cent decrease in technological efficiency. The scale efficiency contributes the most to the overall efficiency improvement, while technical and technological effects seem to have less impact. The fact that technological efficiency has little variance seems to suggest that this source of efficiency gain may not bring substantial competitive advantage.

The sample period is 2000-2007, so the impact from the Asian financial crisis or the economic downturn was not covered. Also, the port throughputs data do not separate shipment and transhipment.

This study provides valuable suggestions to improve efficiency for container ports along the “Maritime Silk Road.”

Cruise tourism is the fastest-growing segment of the shipping and port industry. This study aims to develop an analytic model to assess the key criteria and sub-criteria influencing four cruise port's development in Taiwan.

Based on the literature review, four criteria and 13 sub-criteria are developed and analysed by fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP). Four cruise ports include Kaohsiung, Keelung, Taichung and Hualien ports. The 26 relevant field experts (including cruise operators, governmental officials and academics) were invited to provide information for assessing the sub-criteria in the model.

The results indicate that port infrastructure and facilities are the most important criterion, followed by port-city development plans, port geography and climate and port regulations and services. In addition, the three most important sub-criteria overall are the onshore tourism programme, the city’s historical and cultural features and the green port hinterland transport system. Also, Keelung port is ranked as the best port, followed by Kaohsiung, Taichung and Hualien.

As Asia is an important cruise market in the world (ranked as third) and passenger number in Taiwan has achieved the top two in Asia, denoting Taiwan is a good market to develop an evaluation model of cruise ports. The findings present a holistic picture of the relative importance of the various criteria associated with cruise port development and raise issues related to cruise port marketing and the economic and environmental sustainability of ports and their hinterlands.

The role of clusters in the development and growth of local and national economies has been extensively studied and discussed in global literature. Different methodologies are used for analysing the impact these have in national and regional economies, such as the input–output (IO) and gravity models. This paper aims to detail the methodologies present in the literature and propose a new robust theoretical framework, which facilitates the evaluation and comparison among maritime clusters in terms of attractiveness assisting stakeholders to devise strategies, which will attract companies.

An index is created composed of five key categories, namely, infrastructure, financing, governance, manpower and institution/legislation. For the analysis of the index, multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT) is used as a tool to evaluate the importance and performance of the different attributes using both quantitative and qualitative criteria. The methodology has been tested via the use the Piraeus maritime cluster.

The framework has been tested on its robustness and friendliness to the user providing useful insights to the stakeholders. Among the results has been the importance of the finance, manpower and infrastructure attributes, which appear to promote the cluster’s attractiveness. In addition, legislation and institutional partnerships, along with Government support, need to take place improve the performance of the cluster.

A key limitation is the fact that the methodology has been tested in a single case. Applying the methodological framework in a wider sample of clusters will significantly improve the present work.

The proposed model takes further existing research in the field via adopting the philosophy of the World Bank’s Logistics Performance Index. Among the benefits of the proposed index is that it offers the flexibility and robustness to compare among different maritime clusters globally and can be readily used as a benchmarking policy tool at national, regional and global levels at any given point in time and attribute dimension.

Line balancing has been an important technique for manufacturing system design, because a completely balanced system can provide maximum resource utilization at the designed capacity. However, even if a system is completely balanced, it still has capacity waste when the entire product life cycle is considered, because real production is often significantly less than capacity. Avoiding this mismatch requires scalable systems such as reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMSs) to meet changing product demand. Stage paralleling is suggested as an approach to scalability for RMSs. By comparing the economic feasibility of such manufacturing systems with completely balanced transfer line systems with respect to station cost, it is shown that line balancing is not necessarily desirable with this approach. The effect of station cost differences for unbalanced systems is also considered.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the preferences of potential Japanese cruise ship tourists and identify the factors influencing their participation in cruise ship tourism. In the analysis, preference for cruise ports in East Asia is also examined.

The behavioral model of potential cruiser is developed through a mixed ordered logit approach. The data are collected by means of the stated preference method with the application of a Web-based questionnaire. Multiple answers are collected from each respondent. Hence, panel effects between answers are considered so as to obtain a robust model.

The results show that Nagasaki and Hong Kong ports are preferred, and other domestic ports, namely, Kobe, Kagoshima, and Naha are also relatively popular places to visit. However, potential Japanese cruisers are reluctant to visit two South Korean destinations which are frequently selected as cruise lines by avoiding Cabotage rule. Besides, shorter cruise duration and lower prices increase the possibility of participation in cruise tourism, particularly for working people. Retirees tend to have less interest in cruise tourism. However, Japanese-related services will increase retirees’ intentions to participate in cruise tourism.

This study attempts to analyze potential cruisers’ behavior toward cruise ship tourism in Japan and discusses how to increase the number of cruisers participating in cruise ship tourism. In this vein, repeat behavior should also be analyzed. Repeat behavior contributes to the maintenance and increase in cruisers in Japan.

There is no study on potential cruiser’s behavior analysis in Japan which is the emerging country as cruise market. Thus, the number of potential cruisers is expected to be high. This study reveals that potential cruisers’ preferences on cruise ship services (e.g. duration, price, on board services, etc.), which are separately analysed for working ages and retirees. Besides, preferences on port of calls in East Asian context are revealed. These results are useful for cruise ship industries, especially for cruise lines.

The purpose of this study is to identify the critical success factors to international ship finance centre (ISFC) and to understand the reasons behind ship financing decision by shipowners and their views on the potential of Shanghai to become an ISFC in the near future.

Survey questionnaire and follow-up interviews were conducted. The survey of this study was conducted by firstly sending online questionnaire with interview questions via email and then carrying out interview either on telephone or in-person with the interview questions to collect factual data and views from individual interviewees.

This study identified governmental support and stable policy, sound and favourable legal system, advanced maritime cluster and dynamic source of finance as critical success factors which can help Shanghai to evolve into an international maritime centre with dual function as an ISFC which is a synthesis with the maritime sector of an international finance centre.

This paper is known to be the first to link international maritime centre with ISFC.