The Complementarily Indices of the Inland Freight Flows in the Nigerian Towns from Port Harcourt and Calabar Ports using Gravity Model
This paper is designed to examine the cargo traffic from Nigerian seaports, using the Calabar and Port Harcourt port complexes as case study. The objective being to identify the function for assessing cargo flows from the aforementioned seaport to different towns in the country. This culminated in a model depicting the functional relationship, which exist between the variables used in the study. The regression model was used to fit a gravity model. The study revealed from its results, that population of towns is a very important factor that affects cargo flows from Nigerian Sea Ports, while distance is a less predictive factor. Although the distance variable in this work was found to be insignificant as it has an inverse relationship with cargo volume, it does not actually connote that distance is not relevant in every flow study.
