Linking Container shipping and US business cycle fluctuations

Lutz Kilian, Nikolaos Nomikos and Xiaoqing Zhou in this voxeu research:

An essential feature of the globalisation of the economy since the 1990s has been the growing importance of sea-borne container trade for supply chains. This column develops a monthly index of North American container trade since 1997 and incorporates it into a model of the US economy. It shows that rising and falling frictions in container shipping markets help explain the US business cycle and recovery from the Covid-19 recession. The model suggests that the recovery since the start of the pandemic has been slower than raw data suggest and finds evidence of favourable foreign demand and container market shocks.