North Adriatic Ports: A More Efficient And Greener Gateway For The European-Far East Trade

During its history, the driven force of the European Union has been the develop of a common internal market. The purpose was to help Countries in removing internal trade barriers to facilitate exports inside the European Union territory. Looking out of its boundaries, the two-main trade partners for the European Union were United States and Japan. During the last two decades, the great arise of other Asian countries forced the European Union to build up new strategies and to try to implement them to exploit the opportunities of these new markets. Due to this choice, the European Union started a transition from a “Europe as a single market” to a “single Europe in the global market”. Looking at the statistics, there is no surprise in notice that the three main actors in the global trade are Europe, United States and Asia. They accounted about 88% in total merchandise trade of WTO members during the period 2005-2015 and it is noteworthy that the value of commercial trade has almost doubled in this period. In this framework, maritime trade represents the core way to connect countries, accounting about the 89% of trades, followed by road shipping and lastly air shipping which accounts only for the 3% of the total. This briefly introduction highlights some facts: the actual change in the economic scenario, the increasing shift of trades to the East side of the world and the predominance of the maritime among the other types of transport. These three pillars are the base on which Europe can build its future commercial relations in a more efficient and sustainable way. The aim of the thesis is to demonstrate the opportunity for Italy and its Adriatic ports to play a leading role in this economic scenario thanks to the geography of the territory and the new policies for a more sustainable trade of goods carried out by the IMO and the European Union. To do so, the work will first focus its attention on the characteristics of the world sea trade, pointing out the main features of the diffusion of containers and how the main drivers of ports competition have been able to define sea routes and the actual European port scenario. The discussion will stress the weaknesses of the actual way used by carriers to reach Europe by sea and pointing out also the need of a change, taking also in consideration the consequences of Covid-19 and estimations of its repercussions on trades. This change can be encouraged by the new IMO’s settlement, by the European Green Deal and the ambitious projects about infrastructures of the European Union. So, after a description of these tools the thesis will demonstrate how the cooperation between all the Adriatic ports could satisfy the need of a more efficient and sustainable way of trade between Europe and the Asian countries. Moreover, since Venice is the perfect center of the Adriatic arch composed by the ports of Ravenna, Trieste, Koper and Rijeka, the work will be completed by an overview on the solutions that have been proposed during the last years for the Venice port. This final focus would like to be useful to understand what kind of infrastructure is needed by the Adriatic ports to make them more competitive in the European scenario.