AAPA and Trade Currents to Change the Face of Port Data Reporting

[By: American Association of Port Authorities]

Washington, D.C. – The American Association of Port Authorities (AAPA) — the unified voice of seaports in the Americas — is initiating a unique partnership with Trade Currents, a research firm founded by internationally recognized economists and analysts, to improve the collection, reporting, and analysis of critical port trade data. In the next few weeks, AAPA will distribute surveys to Western Hemisphere ports with the goal of capturing vital data to supplement trade statistics from such agencies as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Census Bureau, Transport Canada, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and the World Bank. This research ultimately aims to elevate and customize support to serve the data analysis needs of AAPA's members, but also benefit the broader trade and logistics industry, research community, and private institutions across the United States.

Together, AAPA and Trade Currents will gather and aggregate cargo throughput statistics — key economic indicators representing the entire port industry — which are the very basis of ports' contribution to their local regions, the broader trade and logistics industry, and the U.S. economy as a whole. Examples of port cargo statistics for this crucial research include volumes for imports and exports of loaded and empty containers, refrigerated containers, cargo tonnage and value, and units carried in vehicle carriers.

Founded by Dr. Walter Kemmsies, Dr. Andrei Roudoi, and Scudder Smith, Trade Currents brings decades of expertise in strategy, research, and industry forecasting. Walter previously held positions as Economist and Chief Strategist of Jones Lang LaSalle; Chief Economist for Moffat & Nichol; Head of European Strategy at JP Morgan in London, and Head of Global Industry Strategy at UBS. Andrei was a previous Senior Economist, Director of World Trade Services, and Principal at Wharton Econometric Forecasting (WEFA), then Global Insight and then IHS Markit. Scudder has been a Principal Freight and Logistics Consultant at Parsons Brinckerhoff, now WSP, for the past 16 years and previously worked at McGraw Hill companies, F.W. Dodge and Data Resources Inc.

As the historic central collector and source of aggregate port data for the industry, AAPA collected and reported annual data, including container traffic, for all North American ports from 1980 to 2019 and annual container traffic for Central and South American ports from 2008 to 2019. Though AAPA has not released annual port statistics for use by the industry in the past three years, AAPA continues to gather and report monthly and yearly container traffic for member ports participating in AAPA’s data surveys. This unique partnership with Trade Currents represents a new phase in AAPA's data reporting and analysis services.

For more information about AAPA’s new port statistics research program, please e-mail Shannon McLeod at [email protected].