Publication Details
Abstract
The research evaluates 867 policy interventions of China National Intermodal Freight Hub Program (2022-2024) policies to explore how policy instrument compositions can be used to organize coordination results. The highest percentages of supply-side instruments (53.3%), environmental instruments (25.5%) and demand-side instruments (21.2%) were observed. The cross-city analysis reveals that the inland hubs have a much bigger portion of supply-side instruments compared to the coastal centers (58.2% vs. 47.6%; χ² = 12.47, p < 0.001). Mechanism coding denotes that operational cooperation is relatively under-embedded, 31.0% of measures are aimed at carrier-shipper coordination. Such results indicate a structural imbalance within which an improvement of physical capacity is not systematically accompanied by institutional and operational integration, thus limiting conversion of infrastructure investment into sustainable coordination performance.