The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has used container freight rates to work out how today’s high shipping costs are affecting global inflation.
The latest blog post on the IMF site entitled ‘How Soaring Shipping Costs Raise Prices Around the World’, IMF economists say that the cost of shipping a container on world trade routes has increased seven-fold in the 18 months following March 2020. This analysis predates the war in Ukraine, but IMF officials suggest that the conflict will probabnly exacerbate global inflation.