Panama Canal expansion and its impact on East and Gulf coast ports of U.S.A.

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on the Panama Canal expansion and its impact on American port infrastructure for the attention of academic researchers in maritime transportation and supply chain management (SCM). First, it provides a comprehensive background based on a review of pertinent practitioner as well as academic publications. This is followed by a summarization of the impact of this expansion on the infrastructure of the major East and Gulf Coast (EGC) ports, since these stand to be the most affected. Then it presents a categorization scheme for these EGC ports that capture their likelihood of attracting the expected increase in cargo traffic engendered by the expansion; this is preliminarily supported by the latest data on growth in container traffic. The policy implications of this categorization are then discussed and the paper ends by identifying key SCM research problems exposed by the above.