Container Throughput across Eastern Mediterranean Ports: National Renewable Integration, Carbon-Price-Weighted Trade Exposure, and Logistics Infrastructure, 2005–2023

Eastern Mediterranean container ports operate across heterogeneous energy, logistics, and regulatory environments, yet comparative evidence on their association with throughput remains limited. This study examines container throughput, National Renewable Integration (NRI), logistics infrastructure, and carbon-price-weighted trade exposure (CPTE) across five countries from 2005 to 2023. The baseline covers seven ports and 133 observations using port fixed effects with port-clustered standard errors; an eighth port enters an unbalanced robustness extension. The study makes three contributions. First, reviewed sources contain no record of on-site renewable generation or onshore power supply across the eight candidate ports, and the estimable renewable measure is therefore the country-level renewable electricity share, termed NRI. Second, CPTE combines carbon-intensive EU-oriented trade composition with the EU ETS allowance price as a common carbon-price benchmark. Third, the study evaluates these relationships within a common fixed-effects framework while recognising limited country-level identifying variation and testing robustness across alternative specifications. Logistics infrastructure is positively associated with throughput in the baseline, but significance is specification and sample sensitive. CPTE is positive rather than negative, NRI has no stable directional association, and the Beirut-specific post-2020 indicator remains negative across reported specifications and significant under port-clustered inference.