Seaport Trends

For a number of years, we have been preparing for internal use quarterly summaries of container traffic on the West Coast of North America. We decided to extend this work and publish it because of the massive declines of container trade in late 2008 and early 2009. We consider that the container traffic volumes provided monthly by the port authorities are a good indicator of trends in the transpacific container trade and to some extent a leading economic indicator. Unlike trade and economic data, there are few measurement issues.

The issues are listed below as PDF files. We intend to publish these quarterly until the world container trade stabilizes.

First Quarter 2009

If you do not have Acrobat Reader, you can download this free software from the Adobe website.

Prepared by Terence Smyth of Seaport Consultants Canada Inc.