KENYA PORT AUTHORITY

ECONOMIC POWER OF KENYA PORTS AUTHORITY.

Kenya Ports Authority (KPA), is a statutory body under the Ministry of Transport, infrastructure, Housing and Urban Development, with the responsibility to maintain, operate, improve and regulate the Port of Mombasa, all scheduled seaports situated along Kenya’s coastline.

Ports generally offers a value proposition to its region since it confers economic Impacts.

(Picture courtesy of google)

There are numerous expectations in the public sector, which often provides substantial capital investments (through the port authority or general funds), to see concrete and measurable economic impacts and benefits resulting from these investments.

Economic impacts concern the wide range of changes brought by infrastructure investment projects.However, many of these impacts can only be observed after the investments have been made.  Forecasting exercise is hazardous and commonly leads to inaccurate assessments.

 Port forecast models are rarely accurate. The bottom line is that estimation of the economic impacts of port investments is an inexact field, which focuses on the effectiveness of transport infrastructure as a catalyst for indirect and induced benefits. Further, these investments are contingent on the scale and scope of changes they generate. Among the most relevant changes that have impacted ports and maritime transport are:

Economic changes

Seaborne trade has increased substantially, in part because of the massive redistribution of manufacturing to low-cost locations and in part because of ongoing economic growth. 

This underlines the growing importance of logistics for organizing the resulting complex distribution system.

Technical changes

The growth in ship size to better achieve economies of scale has been a prevalent technical change.

The employment effects of a port activity usually extend beyond the initial round of employment generated by that activity.