Containerization and globalization
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Yuming Guo
From a t-shirt made in Bangladesh to a car made in South Korea, from a Japan-made forklift to machinery imported from China, global trading is more and more common to everyone in the society: from firms to households, from the rich to the poor, no one can avoid being involved in the unprecedented level of integration of the global economy, or in other word, globalization.
World Merchandise imports in trillion USD, 1953-2017
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Figure 1: World Merchandise Imports, 1953-2017 1
The entire process of globalization has been made possible thanks to plummeting costs of international shipping, which made international trades more and more cost-effective, which made the world economy closer and closer to the optimal economy according to the assumptions of the famous relative advantage theory, where there should be no transportation costs at all. And among all the factors that reduced shipping costs, containerization and automation may be ranked as the most important. Today, a very large proportion of goods shipped worldwide are moved in containers, as figures showed that 90% of non-bulk cargo is already being shipped in a container back in 2009. 2 In this essay, I am going to focus on all the changes containers have brought, from the points of view of shippers, ship and train lines, workers and consumers.
1 World Trade Organization. World trade statistical review 2018. https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/statis_e/wts2018_e/wts2018_e.pdf. 2 Ebeling, C. E. (2009). ‘ Evolution of a Box ’ . Invention and Technology. 23 (4): 8 – 9.
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