The role of the shipping transportation in country and region's development

The main purpose of this research prepared is to examine maritime transportation growing upat the last years and to prepare a supporting platform for strategies that Turkish maritimeindustry will undertake. In this context, by conveying some short information regard tohistory of shipping transportation and features of today?s ports, it is examined sizes anddevelopment of important continental, Mediterranean and Black Sea ports. According to theavailable data, the thesis has tried to find whether there is a relationship between (un)loadingsizes of countries and their fleet capacity as well as some socio-economical parameters. Also,this study has attempted to show effectiveness of the abovementioned relationship. At the lastphase, using the regression analysis, the work has tried to find out correlations between thegrowing ratios of the some most important ports and city population so that to make clear howthe ports contribute to the development of the cities.This examine has been carried out by gathering first-hand sources as well as evaluating thesecondary references. Taking into account that there is no standard information related to theports in the Internet sources, the data of the largest 50 ports in the world has been used as amain research framework. Thanks to more data about the European ports, it has been possibleto make location techniques and to designate the specialized areas of the ports. At the laststep, using data of the first 50 ports, the shipping capacity sizes have been calculated and alsofleet sizes have been added to this data. This data has been used to measure the regressionalrelationship with such parameters of the countries as the GDP, population size, export andimport figures, length of coastlines etc. in order to detect relationship between the maritimesectors and country developments.The first chapter gives some introductory information about ports and maritimetransportation. In the second chapter, a short survey related to history of world shipping hasbeen done. At the beginning of the third chapter, conceptual information regard to ports, theirdefinitions, classifications and changes in port hierarchy in the transit shipping have beengiven. Then, world shipping capacity, world shipping lines, tendencies, development of cargoand containers at ports have been reviewed. Also, dispersion of the cargo and containercapacity has been examined by using the data available from 50 ports as a main source.However, due to the restricted data about some ports, development of ports has beenevaluated according the data of the 10 biggest ports of continents. Thanks to getting detaileddata from the EU ports, the specialized areas have been made clear via the locationtechniques. Examining the shipping capacities of ports of the Mediterranean basin, whereTurkey is also included, and their growth at recent years, it has been tried to determine therole of Turkish ports in the region. Furthermore, in the context of the world-wide greattransport projects it is discussed the possible influences of the future foresights to thedevelopment of ports.In the fourth chapter, by taking the first 50 ports from the world cargo and container shippinglist as a basis data and by making the regression analysis it has been tried to explain therelationship between port capacities of these countries and their social economical parameters.Apart from this, in order to measure the relationship between the ports and growth of thecities, by the regression analysis it has been evaluated connection between the growths ofshipping capacity and city population for the most 8 ports. At the same time, the ports, whichare inseparable parts of cities, apart from being in close socio-economical relationship withthe domain cities, are considerably important in terms of contributions that they make to thedomain country.Key Words: World Ports, Development of the Port-city and Port -country relation