Research on the Amount of Empty Containers in Japanese Main Ports

Economic development is remarkable in Asia and progress of industrialization of NIES, ASEAN, and China in East Asia has increased the international physical distribution in this area. However, an imbalance of trade becomes severe in these areas. The imbalance is especially big in the Asia-North America route and the Japan-China route. The imbalance in the Asia -North America liner route is 5.04 million TEUS in 2002.The transportation ratio of loaded containers between China and Japan route is approximately 3:1 in 2000. In other words, it means that the transportation of loaded containers from China to Japan is 3, the transportation of loaded containers from Japan to China is I. The imbalance at a port is generally obtained by subtracting export loaded container cargo volume from import container cargo volume. However, the imbalance and the empty containers at the port are not always same. Then, in order to evaluate rationalization and efficiency of maritime container transportation, we introduce the amount of empty containers at a port as an evaluation index. However, the past data of the amount of handling empty containers have a lot of lacking portions. Then, it is necessary to estimate the past amount of empty containers in order to grasp the amount of empty containers historically. So, we construct the model that estimates the amount of empty containers using the imbalance of main port statistics in Japan.