Clasificación de los puertos españoles atendiendo a su tipología de tráfico, infraestructura y compromiso medioambiental

Abstract

The main objective of this study is the classification of the Spanish ports of general interest managed by the 28 PortAuthorities. To do it, we have used a group of indicators that characterize the port activity related to transport ofgoods, infrastructure indicators related to the area, depth and available services of the ports, and economicindicators related to the level of commitment to environment and the city where they are located. The informationhas been mainly obtained from the State Port statistics and the annual reports of Port Authorities.Using different multivariate analysis techniques, we analyze a set of sixteen quantitative variables and present themain results of this work. Factor Analysis of Principal Components has allowed us to reduce the number of variablesin four factors, and the classification of the ports has been established using Cluster Analysis.The most important conclusions of this study are the existence of clearly different groups of state ports dependingon their level of specialization in port traffic, and other group of ports that stand out for their environmental and portcity commitments.