It remains in the top 50, and it is making headway against its peers, but Vancouver still has a lot of work to do if it hopes to become a member of the global maritime cities’ top tier.
Five years ago, it was ranked for the first time in the Menon Economics list of the world’s top 50 maritime cities.
Menon’s Leading Maritime Cities (LMC) rankings are based on the insights of experts in such key maritime industry metrics as maritime finance and law, technology, logistics and competitiveness.
Vancouver ranked 24th in the 2017 LMC. This year it has moved up to 17th, just behind Paris, France; Houston, Texas; and Seoul, South Korea; but ahead of Sydney, Australia; Seattle, Washington; and Los Angeles, California, which, along with its sister port in Long Beach, constitutes the largest container cargo-handling hub in North America and the ninth largest in the world.
Vancouver continues to score well in such areas as political stability, transparency and marine transport and logistics cargo handling.
But it still lags well behind other major shipping centres in the local availability of the legal, finance, insurance, brokering, chartering and professional support services that are critical to success in the complex business of international shipping and cargo handling. And when it comes to the ease of doing business, it remains far behind key competitors like Los Angeles, which is ranked fourth overall in that category, while Vancouver is ranked 20th. Singapore, which ranks No. 1 overall in the LMC rankings, is also ranked No. 1 in the ease of doing business category.
Meanwhile, Seattle and Los Angeles both score No. 1 ratings in the survey’s entrepreneurship category; Vancouver ranks sixth.
The detailed Menon study of what distinguishes global maritime centres from regional port towns provides encouraging news for Vancouver and the rest of B.C.’s Asia Pacific Gateway and all the businesses connected with it.
But it also shines a light on the areas where the province and that gateway need to improve to realize the huge transpacific trade potential they both have.
