Measuring the economic and transportation impacts of maritime-related trade

Abstract

International trade brings widespread economic impacts to local, regional, and national economies. Identifying what economic impacts are and how they take place helps guide policy-makers in making decisions that can promote welfare by enhancing or facilitating the transportation of goods and services along a trade corridor. However, the state of the art in economic and transportation impact measurement has been unable to capture the impacts of international trade. It is the purpose of this paper to analyse the cumulative economic and transportation impact of international trade between the United States and Latin America by adopting a case study methodology that delineates trade across a supply chain. To accomplish this task, it is necessary to apply methodological aspects from three different literatures related to transportation and trade, those of economic impact studies (especially port impact studies), supply chain logistics, and transportation corridors. Using our proposed methodology, we provide estimates of cumulative economic and transportation impacts, relying on the direct expenditures of individual shipments of regionally significant commodities from their origins to their destinations. © 2003 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. All rights reserved.