This paper studies the impact of port activity on regional employment, analysing approximately 560 western European regions, including the largest OECD European ports (116 ports), from 2000-06. The empirical analysis is based on a set of employment equations using the Blundell and Bond (1998) GMM-System estimator that takes into account persistence effects in employment, regional unobserved time-invariant heterogeneity and endogeneity of port activity.

Our main findings are (1) regional employment is positively correlated to port throughput, while the number of passengers is not; (2) the impact of port throughput on employment might depend on the institutional characteristics of each port, with private ports having the largest impact on regional employment of the host region if compared with those operating under different governance models (“Hanseatic”, “Latin”); (3) there is a higher impact of port throughput when liquid bulk is not considered; and (4) the main results are confirmed when service and manufacturing employment rather than total employment are considered.