Daily shipping data provides early insight into US trade

CEIC's high-frequency data includes daily shipping figures from Marine Traffic that provide early insights into trends for US foreign trade.

Our first chart tracks the rate of change for two such measures of port traffic and plots them against the equivalent for official statistics on imports, which are only released monthly. Arrival of ships at US ports are charted in green; the blue line tracks unloading of ships in port.

The final US foreign-trade report for June won't be published until August 6. But Marine Traffic data is published with only a one-day lag.

We can see that more boats were being unloaded in late June and early July, but this trend was not sustained. This suggests that official import growth is likely to prove rather subdued.

We invite you to visit our dashboard on this source of shipping data. Marine Traffic provides port calls and port congestion statistics for over 200 countries, with further breakdowns available by major ports and vessel types. Methodologies will vary across countries, but daily shipping traffic will anticipate the official trade data in most markets. (It also feeds into our trade nowcasts.)

If you are a CEIC user, access the story here.