ISBN 978 90 5487 858 2The determinants of throughput volume at a given set of ports have rarely been approached from a network perspective. This paper proposes a set of novel indicators describing the relative situation of seaports in the worldwide maritime network of container shipping in 2006, which are distinguished among five categories: circulation (calls, vessels, and operators), foreland (distance to other ports and distribution of connections), connectivity itself (number of connections to other ports), centrality (betweenness and eccentricity), and neighbourhood (strength and clustering indices). Main results help to classify ports according to their location and function in the network, while they stress which parameters most influence throughput volumes. Although centrality indicators highly correlate with throughput, the latter seems to be influenced mostly by the geographic parameter of the maximum distance link to another port
