The Panama Canal Expansion

Abstract

The Panama Canal has played an important role in the history of the shipping industry. Therefore, it was reasonable to forecast that the Panama Canal expansion would impact port throughput in the six transshipment ports located in Panama. To examine this impact, two periods were analyzed. The first period covered October 2010 to June 2016. The second period covered July 2016 to March 2022. The Wilcoxon signed-rank test and the IBM SPSS Statistics software were used to analyze public data from the Central American Maritime Transport Commission (COCATRAM) measuring port throughput. The research concluded that the Panama Canal expansion has not produced a statistically significant impact on the port throughput of (a) cargo tonnage, (b) cargo TEU and (c) vessel calls.