Determinants of the demand for maritime imports and exports

The main contribution of this research is to offer a theoretical explicative model and provide empirical evidence to the determinant variables which explain the behaviour of maritime imports and exports for a particular economy such as the Spanish one. Until now, maritime transport demand functions have been estimated without taking into account whether they referred to imports or exports. Moreover, the international trade literature has, from a theoretical point of view, formulated and estimated import and export demand functions in general without considering the mode of transport used. (c) 2004 Published by Elsevier Ltd.