Research on the correlation of port economy and regional economy: Empirical analysis of Dalian Port from 2000–2009

Port economy is an indicator of the national economy. Over the past decade, the changes in the port economy reflected the regional economy and even the national economic trends. The aim of this paper is to find out any correlation between port economy and regional economy with the method of statistical analysis of the data of Dalian Port throughput and Liaoning Province's GDP from 2000 to 2009 as empirical sample data. According to the empirical results, the paper proves that port economy and regional economy have functional relationship and main conclusions are drawn as follows: Firstly, there is a similar linear correlation between port throughput and GDP. Secondly, the correlation coefficient is between 0.8 and 1 and indicates the two variables are highly correlated. Thirdly, port economy and regional economy have closely positive influences on each other. The healthy development mode of Dalian Port and regional economy is emerged in the last part based on the above analysis.