Evolution and quantitative evaluation of China's green port policies: Evidence from text mining and text analysis

Yuye ZOU^1,2*Xiaohui Wang^1,2Qiang Zhang²

• ¹School of Economics and Management, Shanghai Maritime University, pudong, China
• ²Shanghai Maritime University, pudong, Shanghai, China

The current research on green port development policies mainly focuses on qualitative analysis, with limited quantitative analysis. To achieve sustainable development of China's ports and accelerate the achievement of the "dual carbon" goal, this paper analyzes 441 China's green port policies using text mining and quantitative evaluation methods. The study first reviews the evolution of these policies and divides them into three stages: the embryonic stage, the startup stage, and the development stage. High-frequency words for each stage were then extracted, and dimensionality reduction was performed using the principal component analysis (PCA), followed by clustering analysis to classify the policies. The latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic model was then applied to extract the main policy themes, and a policy modeling consistency (PMC) index model for green port development policies was constructed. Finally, 19 representative policies were selected for quantitative evaluation through cosine similarity and correlation coefficients. The analysis revealed the following issues with current green port development policies: (1) the entity responsible for policy issuance is singular, and interdepartmental collaboration is insufficient;(2) short-term policies are severely insufficient, with weak responsiveness; (3) policies targeting shipping companies are insufficient and have not fully realized their potential; (4) the use of policy instruments is unbalanced, with a focus on mandatory and hybrid tools. Finally, several suggestions are proposed according to the findings of the paper.