Shipping Prices and Import Price Inflation

Maggie Isaacson and Hannah Rubinton

No 2022-017, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Abstract: During the pandemic there have been unprecedented increases in the cost of shipping goods accompanied by delays and backlogs at the ports. At the same time, import price inflation has reached levels unseen since the early 1980s. This has led many to speculate that the two trends are linked. In this article, we use new data on the price of shipping goods between countries to analyze the extent to which increases in the price of shipping can account for the increase in U.S. import price inflation. We find that the pass-through of shipping costs is small. Nevertheless, because the rise in shipping prices has been so extreme, it can account for between 3.60 and 5.87 percentage points per year of the increase in import price inflation during the post-Pandemic period.

Keywords: inflation; shipping; trade (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E31 F15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2022-08-30, Revised 2022-08-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-int, nep-mon and nep-tre
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://s3.amazonaws.com/real.stlouisfed.org/wp/2022/2022-017.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Shipping Prices and Import Price Inflation (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedlwp:94687

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

DOI: 10.20955/wp.2022.017

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Scott St. Louis ().