Fathoming Shipping Costs: An Exploration of Recent Literature, Data, and Patterns

Abstract

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

Competition and Price Discrimination in International Transportation

“…I estimate the relationship between freight payment and shipment size across shipments exported from Chile to Paraguay within exporter-route, in Table A14. I find the same average quan-17 This is similar to the estimates of a spot market size in the US trucking and global maritime industries in Harris and Nguyen (2022) and Ardelean et al (2022).…”

“…Another concern is whether freight price variation in maritime container shipping is also driven by price discrimination. This is a valid concern given that maritime transportation carries 70% of the world trade (Ardelean et al (2022)) and is known to feature economies of scale (Asturias et al (2019)). To address it, I construct a novel dataset on container freight prices in maritime transportation to Peru.…”

How Far Goods Travel: Global Transport and Supply Chains from 1965-2020

“…While the total capacity of the containerized fleet capacity increased eight times from 1996-2021, the number of containerships only increased by three-fold (Ardelean et al 2022). As crew size and fuel costs do not increase proportionally with ship sizes, larger ships take advantage of the cost savings from larger capacities.…”

“…Global trade is conducted using land, sea, and air. Transport costs have fallen across all three modes in the last 50 years (Ardelean et al 2022). Two technologies have exhibited extraordinary cost decreases: containerized and air freight.…”

Leader-follower dynamics in real historical time: a Markovian test of non-linear causality between sail and steam (co-)development

“…Our findings also represent a tentative contribution to the substance of those debates ranging in the fields of cliometrics regarding the driving forces behind the process of globalisation taking shape in the late 19th century (see (Diebolt and Hagemann 2019)). Indeed, new have of literature has emerged trying to understand the full role of technological advances in ocean shipping and, more generally, the competitive interplay of alternative (complex and expensive) capital products co-evolving in a market characterised by uncertainty (see Madureira (2010); Mendonça (2013); Pascali (2017); Hanlon (2019); Ferreiro (2020); Ardelean et al (2022)). This paper presents a number of econometric exercises that deepen the insights of studies which have documented the significance of product-level heterogeneity (technology, size) and its effect on the international maritime sector (structural change and growth).…”