State analysis and development prospects of cargo traffic through the sea ports of Russia

Cargo tonnage in sea ports is an indicator of regional and global trade, which to a large extent is determined by the development of the world economy in general, it is positively correlated with GDP and other important macroeconomic indicators. The article describes the main trends of the world maritime trade, analyzes the state of the world infrastructure in detail, and draws the conclusions on improving the infrastructure of the Russian ports. The relevance of the work is justified by the fact that Russia has a favorable geostrategic position and has a long coastline. This provides the opportunity of developing the world trade, realizing the storage and processing of cargoes from the neighboring countries, which in turn should lead to the development of the regions concerned and the country as a whole. Special attention is paid to the dynamics of transshipment in the sea ports of Russia, the Ukraine and Baltic States for the period from 2011 to 2016. It can be seen from the statistics that since 2013 a large part of Russian foreign trade cargo flows has been forwarded from the ports of the Ukraine and Baltic countries to the domestic ports. Negative factors such as political instability, the volatility of the exchange rate, high custom duties, of course, led to a decrease in the volume of transshipment through foreign ports. But despite the increasing external barriers, the task of forwarding goods set by the Government of the Russian Federation, is not fully achieved, if only because of the fact that there is not enough production capacity for all these cargoes in the Russian ports. The Strategy of Maritime Transport Development up to 2030 states that port infrastructure will significantly improve, this will allow to achieve the desired result in the short term at the expense of investment in the sector of Maritime transport. But the indicator of current success of any transport system is the demand for freight transport. They became the object of the research. To understand the relationship of Russian export cargo through the seaports with the macroeconomic conditions represented by gross domestic product and index of industrial production, the corresponding econometric analysis for the period from 2006 to 2016 was carried out where the two following models were used: linear regression and autoregression with distributed lags.