The Waves of Containerization: Shifts in Global Maritime Transportation

Jean-Paul Rodrigue received a Ph.D. in Transport Geography from the Université de Montréal (1994) and has been a professor at Hofstra University since 1999. Dr. Rodrigue's research interests mainly cover the fields of transportation and economics as they relate to logistics and global freight distribution. Specific topics over which he has published extensively cover maritime transport systems and logistics, global supply chains and production networks, gateways and transport corridors. He has authored five books, 25 book chapters, more than 40 peer reviewed papers, numerous reports, and delivered more than 135 conferences and seminar presentations, mostly at the international level. Dr. Rodrigue developed a widely used online reference source about transportation which became a textbook, The Geography of Transport Systems, with its third edition published in June 2013. He is also on the international editorial board of the Journal of Transport Geography and the Cahiers Scientifiques du Transport, acts as the Van Horne Researcher in Transportation and Logistics (University of Calgary). He is a member of the PortEconomics.eu initiative regrouping the world's leading maritime transport academics and performs advisory and consulting assignments for international organizations and corporations. Dr. Rodrigue is a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Advanced Manufacturing (2011-2013). In 2013, the US Secretary of Transportation appointed Dr. Rodrigue to sit on the Advisory Board of the US Merchant Marine Academy. The container, like any technical innovation, has a functional (within transport chains) and geographical diffusion potential where a phase of maturity is eventually reached. Evidence from the global container port system suggests five main successive waves of containerization with a shift of the momentum from advanced economies to developing economies, but also within specific regions. These waves are illustrative of major macroeconomic, technological and sometimes political shifts within the global economy. Containerization has therefore a cyclic behavior and that inflection points are eventually reached, marking the end of the diffusion of containerization in a specific port or port range. Future expectations about the growth of containerization thus need to be assessed within an economic cycle perspective instead of the rather linear perspectives.