From Ports to Platform Sales: Maritime Connectivity and E-Sales Adoption in Europe
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Digital commerce is growing across Europe, but adoption remains uneven. This study tests whether national maritime connectivity complements firms’ online sales. Using secondary data for 21 European economies from 2014 to 2024, we merge Eurostat’s e-sales share of turnover with the UNCTAD’s Liner Shipping Connectivity Index, annualized from quarterly releases using within-year medians. We estimate two-way fixed-effects models with Driscoll–Kraay standard errors and run a robustness suite (leave-one-country-out, sliding windows, quadratic terms, dynamic lead/lag checks, Huber robust regression). Results show a positive but modest association: the baseline coefficient (~0.018) implies that a 100-point increase in LSCI corresponds to a 1.8 percentage-point higher e-sales share. Estimates are directionally stable across probes; curvature is indistinguishable from zero, and dynamics show no strong pre-trends. We conclude that maritime connectivity incrementally enables digital commercialization. Coordinated investments in ports and corridors, combined with SME digitalization and cross-border facilitation, are likely to be more effective than siloed interventions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".