Since the 1970s, exports and imports of manufactured goods have been the engine of international trade and much of that trade relies on container shipping. This paper introduces a new monthly index of the volume of container trade to and from North America. Incorporating this index into a...

By employing a panel vector autoregressive approach, we show that containership trade is an important determinant ofGDP growth. Using the full sample of sea-transported container boxes of 135 countries for ten years, we provideevidence that the amount of TEUs transported, both contemporaneously...