Widening the Panama Canal and U.S. ports: historical and economic impact analyses

ABSTRACT

The economic history of the U.S. illustrates how the role of many cities has been changed by being seaports or located on navigable rivers or lakes. Based on the widening of the Panama Canal in 2016, the West Coast ports that include the west coast seaports of California, Oregon, and Washington were expected to become less important, while the freight shares of the East Coast and Gulf ports would increase. By how much it has been not easy to measure or predict so far, but this study attempted to define some of the key parameters in the measurement. As well as several relevant background topics, both the demand- and supply-side versions of the National Interstate Economic Model, have been applied for the measurement of economic impacts. U.S. port authorities and policy makers at the local and national levels who respond and develop plans for coping with the new realities of the Panama Canal are able to understand the extent to which changes in shippers’ and land-mode transporters’ behaviors would undermine the logistics and the costs of their activities. Therefore, this study is important for a diverse spectrum of port development strategies in the U.S. to respond to the Canal expansion.

KEYWORDS:

• Panama Canal expansion
• US port history
• NIEMO
• West Coast seaports
• economic impacts

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) Research and Innovation Technology Administration (RITA) and the Korea Environment Industry & Technology Institute (KEITI). Also, this article is a revised and expanded version of a paper entitled “The Impact of the Widening of the Panama Canal on U.S. Ports,” invited and presented at the Seaports in Transition meeting during March 13–15, 2014 at Hamburg, Germany. However, any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of USDOT, KEITI, and the meeting organizer. Finally, we appreciate anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments that significantly improved this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at DOI:10.17605/OSF.IO/TPA6U.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) Research and Innovation Technology Administration (RITA) through the University Transportation Research Center, Region II, Research and Advanced Technology Initiative [# DTRT12-G-UTC02]; and the Korea Environment Industry & Technology Institute (KEITI) through Climate Change Research and Development Program funded by the Korea Ministry of Environment (MOE) [# 2018001310002].