Evolution and research trends of container shipping

Abstract

The shipping industry was transformed by the expansion of international trade and technological innovation, notably containerization, since the 1960s. Accordingly, this was followed by a significant increase in research addressing different aspects of container shipping. Despite such availability, important questions have remained unanswered: what are the major contributions that the research community has made to the container shipping industry, global and regional economies? Have their contributions been skewed towards particular themes, directions, and geographical areas? What can the shipping research community learn from the evolution and trends of container shipping research so that they can continue to contribute to the well-being of the global and regional economies? To address these questions, the paper undertakes a critical review and analysis on the evolution and trends of research in container shipping in the past four decades, based on a collection of 282 papers investigating different topics in container shipping featuring in major scholarly journals between 1967 and 2012. The study enables the shipping research community to enhance self-understandings and identifies major gaps for further research.

Acknowledgments

The study is supported by the University of Manitoba’s VPRI, the I.H. Asper School of Business Research Funds (314942), and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s UGC Matching Grant (J-BB7B). Also, the authors would like to acknowledge the contribution of the research assistant, Ellie Chow, in the preparation of the manuscript. An earlier version was presented during the 40th Anniversary Conference of Maritime Policy & Management (held in Seoul, South Korea, 21 June 2013). The usual disclaimers apply.

Notes

^1. For instance, as a direct response to Ng (2013) who highlighted the excessive concentration of research towards the practical, daily port activities since 1990, together with a clear decline of research on port-regional relationship, scholars from four continents initiated a special issue in Growth and Change (to be published in 2014) which addressed different topics on port, maritime logistics, and regional development, e.g., port development in the peripheral areas, the impacts of ports on regional economy, the roles of ports in promoting inter-regional linkages, etc. For further details, see Ng et al. (forthcoming).

^2. Due to article length restriction imposed by MPM, the full list of the papers is not included here. Thus, readers should refer to an earlier version (Lau et al. 2013) for full details. Alternatively, the full list is also available from the corresponding author upon request.

^3. Based on the stated definitions, papers with topics which did not directly address the daily operations of ships (e.g., the technical details of shipbuilding) and/or published in journals within the highly specialized disciplines (e.g., law and finance) were not included in the study.

^4. In this case, transport journals which had clear ‘economic taste’ were included, like the Journal of Transport Economics and Policy.

^5. For further details on the history and evolution of the neoliberal ideology, and its impacts on economic policies around the world, see Harvey (2005).

^6. This problem was not unique to shipping research. Indeed, most empirical studies in the aviation and rail sectors were related to the passenger market and, in general, economic studies on the cargo and logistics markets lagged behind those on passengers.