Study on the interaction mechanism between Shanghai Port throughput and urban economy

Interaction between ports and urban economies plays a crucial role in enhancing both port competitiveness and urban development. To deeply understand their relationship, this study explores the dynamic interaction between Shanghai Port and the urban economy by utilizing the time series data of Shanghai from 2000 to 2022 and incorporating exogenous variables such as international economic fluctuation, technological change and economic policy uncertainty. The Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) model alongside cointegration tests, Granger causality tests and variance decomposition methods were also employed for empirical analysis. The main purpose of this study is to provide a theoretical framework for the benign interaction between Shanghai Port and the urban economy, specifically examining the interaction mechanism between Shanghai Port cargo throughput, container throughput and Shanghai GDP. The results of our study show that there is a stable dynamic equilibrium relationship between Shanghai Port and GDP, where the contribution of GDP to container throughput is much greater than that of cargo throughput, and the contribution of cargo throughput to GDP is higher than that of container throughput to GDP. Finally, recommendations are proposed for promoting the coordinated development of the Shanghai Port and the urban economy.