Freight Flows in the Baltic Seaports of Russia: Factors, Trends and Perspective

Abstract

The volatility of the exogenous conjuncture has been increasingly affecting the Russian Baltic sea ports economics in terms of freight flows dynamics, destinations and commodity items share. The methodological distinction between the notion of ‘freight turnover’ and ‘freight flow’ is given for specification of the port activity, measured in qualitative indicators, consistent with the supply chain peculiarity on the contrary of the quantitative indicators, measured in tons. The classification of the factors, affecting the freight flows is represented as well. The freight turnover at the Russian Baltic ports has been gradually dropping. The unfavorable political conditions as well the world economy and trade downturns are not the only main reasons. The research is focused on the dynamics and structure of the freight flows at the Russian Baltic sea ports under the impact of political, ecological and economic factors, when the COVID-19 pandemic reveals the main ‘bottlenecks’ of their current economics and entails the global supply chain disruption. The ongoing global economic crisis results in the world trade squeezing, causes trade conflicts and increase the cases when trade became unfair practice in the political deals. The author of the article makes a special focus on the raw resource freight turnover specialization of the Russian sea ports as one of the most critical characteristics. In a time of growing risks and uncertainty large scale investments with the long term return into development of port facilities and port construction should be thoroughly analyzed. The author concludes that the freight redirection from the European sea ports to the Russian sea ports, located on Baltic Sea, will have positive, however, short-term, effect. The long term sustainability of the Russian Baltic sea ports will be determined by the reduction of the raw resources dependence and diversification of the freight flows, which also means increasing the share of cabotage and containerized cargo

Keywords

• world economic crisis
• global supply chain disruption
• freight turnover
• freight flows
• russian baltic sea ports
• export
• raw resource dependence
• freight flows diversification
• containerized cargo
• cabotage
• structural reforms