What’s inside the box? Approximating containerised trade flows based on trade commodity values

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ABSTRACT Containerisation plays a critical role in global supply chains and their container flows. The United Nations COMTRADE database provides data on trade flows across various product categories and time periods that are likely to be containerised. This paper undertakes a detailed analysis of the corresponding data, aiming to evaluate whether the data assumptions generally used provide a good approximation of actual containerised trade flows. An iterative and randomised assessment of different COMTRADE data subsets is undertaken. The analysis shows the assumption that the same product categories are likely to be containerised at a similar level for all countries is invalid. This paper seeks to provide accurate and tested insights on the nature of containerised freight.