The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - Second Edition with a new chapter by the author

by Marc Levinson

Being landlocked, one study calculated, raises a country’s average shipping costs by half. Another study found that it cost $2,500 to ship a container from Baltimore, on the U.S. Atlantic Coast, to Durban, in South Africa—and $7,500 more to haul it by road the 215 miles from Durban to Maseru, in Lesotho. Within China, the World Bank reported in 2002, transporting a container from central China to a port cost three times as much as shipping it from the port to America. China was slow to learn the lesson: in the early 21st century, it built the Yangshan Deep-Water Port, near Shanghai, to be the world’s largest container terminal—without providing a railway link to move the cargo cheaply to and from the dock.