The Shipping Container and Globalization

a.              I found the precision and efficiency of the whole shipping process to be quite interesting. Hundreds of thousands of tons of material is shipped on 1,000 foot freighters manned by around 20 people across the world in a couple of weeks. Before the shipment even reaches its destination, everything about the unloading process is already predetermined and handled by computers to make the process run smoothly. Apparently, there is a special order in which the containers need to be taken off in order to maintain balance on the ship, and each one of the 40 ton boxes are moved swiftly and carefully to their next destination. This process takes about 2 minutes per container and around 40 can be taken care of in an hour. I found it remarkable that some ports such as Tokyo and Los Angeles around 10,000 containers a day, and it really put my understanding of the amount of materials being imported into the United States into perspective.

b.              The author sees the development of the shipping container to be a major factor in the global market and globalization. The shipper container drastically lowered the transportation costs of goods making the cost of transportation almost insignificant. This made it possible for suppliers of raw materials and manufactures to be in different locations, allowing for the price of many goods to drop. This gave developing countries a chance to enter the global market as suppliers and manufactures since cost of labor was cheaper and a larger variety of raw materials could be used. Shipping containers were even made in uniform sizes so that the machinery around the world to handle them would be the same and the process would be much easier.

c.               The transformation to a globalized market has some pros and cons. From a general economic standpoint, the development of the shipping container is great. According to the article, “In the decade after the container first came into international use, in 1966, the volume of international trade in manufactured goods grew more than twice as fast as the volume of global manufacturing production, and two and a half times as fast as global economic output.”. This is a significant improvement that helped increase the integration of the global economy. Also, the development of shipping containers opened the door to a much larger, globalized market, which made it so that local markets had to adapt to the global market in order to keep up. Although the market became more globalized, many local workers lost their jobs because they could not compete with the cost of labor in other parts of the world. Also, since so many shipping containers are shipped daily, they cannot be examined and regulated thoroughly so the transportation of illegal drugs, undeclared merchandise, undocumented immigrants, and terrorist bombs was also facilitated by this change.