Bilateral Container Trade Relationship among Asian and Developed Economies

摘要

Over the past few decades,global trade has gone through an explosion of growth,and the development in international container shipping is one of the most dynamic economic sectors of the last few years.The infrastructure such as EDI system and port facilities,required to support these trends,has likewise gone through radical developments and continuous improvements.The basic unit of trade is the bilateral trade between two countries and the condition of one country has influenced on another country.So,this paper aims to reveal the intra-regional trade dependence and global trade dependence by analyzing the bilateral container trade trends.The study investigates the bilateral container trade trends among 14 selected countries to examine the strength of linkages between two countries using the container data from 1990 to 2003.The 14 countries are 11 Asian countries in East Asia and South East Asia (Japan,China,Hong Kong,Singapore,Taiwan,Korea,Thailand,Malaysia,Philippines,Indonesia and Vietnam) and 3 developed economies (USA,Germany and Netherlands).The paper identifies eight patterns of container trade trends and the associated factors that have influence on the changing patterns of container trends are also discussed.Finally,we show a multilateral dependent relationship among these countries;and the relationship to the development of port related EDI system.