Review Of ‘The Location And Global Network Structure Of Maritime Advanced Producer Services’

Theoretical and methodological issues addressed in the research

Give the review on followin points..

• Demonstrate an understanding of the theoretical and methodological issues addressed in the research.

• Include a critical examination of the rationale and methodology employed.

• Discuss the strengths and weaknesses as well as limitations of the article.

• Indicate what the implications of the weaknesses and limitations are

• Indicate how the authors can improve the paper

• Finish with an overall evaluation of the article

• Be well written: clear, concise and error-free.

While the current article revolves around a few theoretical queries on the functional relationship of advanced producer services with management and maritime sector, and presents a well examined picture of micro determinants affecting their outcomes, the replication of ideas do not seem fully clear. And taking the outcomes in their face value, the authors claim their findings to be important for policy people involved in maritime cities. At one side, the authors apprehend the investments undertaken in expansion of ports and the infrastructure thereof definitely accrue enhancement in flow of cargos using the ports, at the same time do not really find much evidence to support the idea how this would lead to increased value addition into the current economy of the region in specialized or advanced type of services. At the same time, authors seem to be have a hitch that enhanced cargo flow by virtue of their power to undermine the amenities present in urban areas, could negatively affect the possibility of getting more advanced type of service with a lot of significance in provision of specialized and advanced kind of service in maritime sectors.

Based on this intuition the authors infer that more of such invest­ments in sea port based hardware infrastructures aiming for future major growths in the flow of commod­ities would necessarily not end in producing advanced provision of services in surrounding urban areas, rather would create a risk for these areas to increasingly become closed in. As opposed to this idea, the article recommends that the focus of strategic policies for port cities should dwell on getting on board many ship owners’ head quarter based offices and industries on port management matching with the advanced maritime management services. Taking this model for replication in sectors other than maritime, this article suggest the policy makers who are involved with economic developments of urban areas to pay closer attention into developing actual level connections be­tween other sectors and advanced producer services. However keeping a caution in place about the theoretical model of applying this idea across the board, the authors again suggest that rather than taking a few dominant level global cities that has power to afford to policies on advanced service based activities, the urban policy makers should pay higher attention to such relationships among already existing sectors involved in export of goods and services.

The paper seems quite relevant for research of current time as there has been a significant magnitude of empirical research on world class cities added with urban level networks that has emphasized greatly on networks within firms involved with advanced producer services. These services and networks helps in connecting cities which in turn enable the production of services and goods to a higher scale. In this study, a comparative analysis has been undertaken between general levels advanced producer services and those which have got specialization in services rendered to transport industries in maritime sector considering 2 major constructs such as location of advances services and connectivity network of the same. It dwells on the established knowledge that these specializations in maritime industries have a positive impact on varying hierarchy in global level urban system vis-a-vis conventional research on world city. At the same time the intriguing question that surrounds the authors are whether the specificity inbuilt in a sector as such would not explain fully why high ranked cities by better connectivity and establishments unlike the case of world ranked cities.

Critical examination of the rationale and methodology employed

The article spins around a number of questions about the both theoretical basis and methodological applications to find a causal relationship between existing externals factors and configuration involving locational-network dyad in advanced and specialized maritime sector production service. The specific question from this author dwells on the magnitude of impact caused by sector level specialization on advanced producer services’ locational pattern and spatial distribution of networks among cities. This question of the authors finds its origin from a theoretic critique of literature and other sources that develop some sort of belief that the specificity of sectors may have a causal relationship with special pattern and locational configuration in urban level networks. As an extra addition to these ideas, the current article goes a few more miles in testing the same in maritime sector thinking that agglomeration tendency of ports in certain places may produce similar results. The authors dwell on 3 hypotheses about the nature of agglomeration, such as this phenomenon would happen in maritime sector near existing sea ports, proximity to global level shipping and port-based industries at local economy based communities and near providers of similar advanced services.

One of the positive points of the article is that it uses a major data base with clear cut design to measure the networks and an econometric model to explain the variability in explanatory variables. It has employed the World Shipping Register, which presents one of the largest data base on shipping companies by type and location. While the authors claim this to be well updated, they cleaned the data before analysis by removing multiple entries and AMPS locations zeroing at 4999 firms of AMPS category, more than ten thousand establishments across 2569 number of cities and specifically 702 number of firms with multiple establishments for undertaking network analyses. The paper uses a methodologically strong and sound process to analyses the raw data from the source. It constructs port related variables, localization factors, and urban variable from connectivity and establishment data following regression analyses. In developing the network constructs, the authors used location related information for different establishments’ annual reports and relevant websites and classified them into firms of regional, global and country HQs. They have followed  the behavioral and social network based 3 models of Taylor (2001), such as economy of the world, base of service production the nodes or cities, and firms providing advanced producer service. The article uses econometric model by giving clear rationale about the nature of data and kind of limits the statistic provide. Since the dependent variables of this study suffer high variance compared to mean, the enhanced ­dispersion was chosen to be analyzed by negative binomial model of regression, hence this technique used in the paper seems to be a valid one.

Hence the critical review of this article shows that the author’s aim to find causal relationship among specific variables and examining them in the line of existing theoretical models are achieved to a higher extent. One of the most significant causal relationship the article contributes to the research sphere is that the bivariate and multivariate analyses employed by this study finding the service locations being explained more by clients’ presence, owners of ships and industry rather than the port itself across the flows. This finding further strengthens the established theoretical models on location of business points emphasizing spatial type of proximity existing with firms, thereby supporting theory of bigger port cities obtaining higher rank than center merely depending on load services across different countries. The paper has societal relevance in terms of designing proper policies, towards achieving holistic progress. However a minor component seem to be missing in this article that it does not separately consider countries with small and large level of economy with infrastructure level differentials. However the data it has used and the models employed to examine the causal links are valid and hence reliable for similar contexts, hence conclusions are also deemed justified. Hence this article can be recommended for reference by academia for further research, and by policy makers while designing the urban development frameworks.

Reference:

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