When Professor Soares asked me to highlight the state-of-the-art in maritime economics and logistics research, as a keynote speech for MARTECH 2022, I immediately said ‘yes’. On second thought, however, I considered something like this would be a bit too ambitious if not pretentious. Thus, below you will read about the things that we ourselves have done in the last 5 years, with my teams in Europe and China, leaving what others are doing in the fields of technology, engineering, etc. up to them to discuss and expose. Below is only a selective sample of our output, for the benefit of MARTECH 2022 audience. For more, interested readers our directed to my Google Scholar and Scopus profiles, as well as to the hundreds of shorter articles on my Linkedin profile and blog . The review is written with one principal objective in mind: Rather than placing the emphasis on the technical prowess of our work, my narrative exposes the ramifications of the research, the reasons it was carried out, the issues at stake and, finally, the doors we have opened to future research.The objective of this article -an extended version of my MARTECH 2022 presentation- is to give maritime researchers, particularly PhD students, postdocs, and tenure-track university staff, leads, tips and advice on possible avenues their research could take in the future, for higher impact, addressing at the same time ‘real’ and current issues requiring solutions that draw the attention of the wider business and policy sectors. Such areas nowadays span a wide kaleidoscope, encompassing global shipping alliances (something of renewed interest following the recent dissolution of the Maersk-MSC (2M) alliance); carrier expectations and shipping market structures; regional port integration; port hinterlands; optimization of container terminal operations; Chinese port investments abroad (BRI); ship-recycling and investment incentives; ship emissions trading; e-fuels (e.g., hydrogen) for shipping, and more. The maritime academia is often criticized for descriptive research, and this is rather unfortunate. I refer here to the type of research consisting of percentages, graphs, tables, and the like. Usually, such research stays on the surface of issues, involving little analytical depth. I have also done quite a lot of this myself over the years. Depending on the ‘audience’ --often practical and busy businesspeople--, descriptive research does have a certain value and, at times, it is even expected. However, such output is rarely appreciated in university environments, or respectable scientific reviews (journals) and quite rightly so, particularly when it comes to the academic advancement of junior staff. Below, i have stayed away from this type of output (with one or two exceptions), discussing only our more rigorous type of research. The word ‘rigorous’ may deserve some more qualification in the present context. We, economists, like many other professionals, are ‘builders’ and ‘tailors’. To build our houses, to sew our suits, we need tools and, for us, such tools, ‘trade tools’ if you like, are economic analysis, mathematical economics, statistics, econometrics, and operations research. This is the type of research that follows, again in an attempt to give you tips, advice, and leads that may or may not help you, or interest you, in doing things that you would like to do in the future