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Considering 91 countries with seaports, this study conducted an empirical inquiry into the broader economic contribution of seaborne trade, from a port infrastructure quality and logistics performance perspective. Investment in quality improvement of port infrastructure and its contribution to economy are often questioned by politicians, investors and general public. A structural equation model (SEM) is used to provide empirical evidence of significant economic impacts of port infrastructure quality and logistics performance. Furthermore, analysis of a multigroup SEM is performed by dividing countries into developed and developing economy groups. The results reveal that it is vital for developing countries to continuously improve the quality of port infrastructure as it contributes to better logistics performance, leading to higher seaborne trade, yielding higher economic growth. However, this association weakens as the developing countries become richer.

This study introduces a state-of-the-art volatility forecasting method for container shipping freight rates. Over the last decade, the container shipping industry has become very unpredictable. The demolition of the shipping conference system in 2008 for all trades calling a port in the European Union (EU) and the global financial crisis in 2009 have affected the container shipping freight market adversely towards a depressive, and non-stable market environment with heavily fluctuating freight rate movements. At the same time, the approaches of forecasting container freight rates using econometric and time series modelling have been rather limited. Therefore, in this paper, we discuss contemporary container freight rate dynamics in an attempt to forecast for the Far East to Northern Europe trade lane. Methodology-wise, we employed Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) as well as the combination of ARIMA and Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (ARCH) model, which we call ARIMARCH. We observed that our ARIMARCH model provides comparatively better results than the existing freight rate forecasting models while performing short-term forecast on a weekly level. We also observed remarkable influence of recurrent general rate increases (GRIs) on the container freight rate volatility.

This paper aims to analyze the potential future of the 4PL concept based on expert opinions withspecial regard to the influence of digitalization coming with a disruptive trans-formation of supply chains.Service arrangements, provider capabilities and benefits resulting from a 4PL partnership are compared incurrent and future configurations. The research follows an explorative mixed methods approach with semistructuredinterviews followed by an expert panel. This builds a basis for an online survey questionnaire toinquire on important future aspects for the 4PL concept by a sample of respondents from multinationalcompanies. Our results show a clear trend away from simply organizing transportation and logisticsactivities towards the provision of an IT platform as well as further value-added service activities such asplanning, analytics and monitoring. Along with this, IT capabilities appear to be an important differentiatorfor 4PL providers in the future. Moreover, relationships between 4PL providers and their clients becomecloser and more strategic, which leads to a customer valuing not only direct cost reductions but ratherimprovements resulting from optimized operations through superior analysis and planning functions.

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