The impact of Covid-19 on the performance of seaports

Abstract

The COVID-19 outbreak had a serious effect on the global economy, particularly the volume of port trade. This article was intended to fill an important gap noticeable in the existing studies, by specifically investigating the impacts of the economic landscape, severity of the outbreak, and governmental control measures on the import and export goods of eight seaports in Tunisia. To achieve this, we employed panel regression models, utilizing a time series dataset spanning from the first quarter of 2020 to the third quarter of 2022. Based on the attained results, the preventive measures and stringent governmental control index and the cumulative number of confirmed cases have negative impact on the imported and exported goods, though the exported goods has been rather severely affected by the spread pandemic. At the economic level, the industrial added value has been discovered to be significantly and positively correlated with the imported and exported cargos respective throughputs, while GDP turned out to be significantly and negatively correlated with imported and exported goods. Such findings, we reckon, could be of great help to the shipping companies, port operators as well as the governmental authorities to shift strategies and opt for appropriate measures likely to help in coping with any potential effects of similar crises.