1. IntroductionThe increasing liberalization of international trade that occurred during the decades following the Second World War under the impetus of various multilateral agreements and organizations resulted in a dramatic change in the geographic scope of logistics and freight transportation systems. While new trade ties with East Asia have emerged, long-standing trading partners such as the United States and European nations have also intensified their trade relations, to the point where the European Union is the United States' largest trading partner and this trade represents 4% of US gross domestic product (BEA, 2010). The intensification of long-range trade routes has strengthened the critical role of seaports, as gateways to economic spaces and as nodes in global deep-sea liner shipping networks (Goss, 1990 ; Notteboom and Rodrigue, 2007 ; A countervailing force has been that shipping companies have now become dominant players in world trade because they operate on a global scale and often have the ability to route their services through one of multiple seaports (Slack, 1993). (1993), “ports can no longer expect to attract shipping companies because they are natural gateways to a rich hinterland” (p. 581), and the same applies to containerized cargo transport activities. Competition patterns and processes among seaports have changed and are expected to remain quite dynamic in the face of rapidly changing economic environments (Meersman et al., 2010) The purpose of this chapter is to represent the state of interport competition from a multidimensional perspective. To this end, we adopt the framework of the “functional economic space” (Gatrell, 1983) whose genesis is found... halfway through the article ......oi, M. (2003). Port and shipper carrier selection criteria in China: An analysis of discrete choices, Maritime Economics and Logistics, 5, 23-39. United States International Trade Commission. (2007). HTS: 2007-07-02 - Revision 2, Annotated Official United States Harmonized Tariff Schedule. http://www.usitc.gov/tata/hts/bychapter/_0702.htm, accessed September 15, 2011. Trongzon, J. L., & Sawant, L. (2007). The choice of port in a competitive environment from the perspective of shipping companies. Applied Economics, 39, 447-492. Veldman, S. J., & Buckmann, E. H. (2003). A competition model in container ports: an application for Western European container hub ports. Maritime Economy and Logistics, 5, 3-22. Yan, J., & Thill, J. C. (2008). Visual Data Mining in Spatial Interaction Analysis with Self-Organizing Maps. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 36, 466-486.