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Global Logistics-June 2015
GCC States Warm to Regional Collaboration Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states —Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain—have long been hamstrung by independent-minded sovereigns who prefer to think and act unilaterally. Despite the formation of the trade bloc in 1981, collaboration, especially around transportation and logistics, often goes wanting. It’s why […]
Read MoreTrends—June 2015
Highway Trust Funding: Déjà vu All Over Again? News that U.S. Congress and President Obama are about to finalize a two-month extension to the lame duck Highway Trust Fund has elicited mixed reaction from industry. Some are optimistic because legislators were able to push through a bill without undue delay, especially as summer construction work […]
Read MoreTrends—May 2015
U.S. Ports Critical to Sustained Economic Growth Transportation budgeting at the state and federal levels has become a contentious battleground as politicians and private sector lobbyists search for new funding mechanisms to execute much-needed infrastructure upgrades. One point of consensus is that U.S. ports are key to sustained economic growth—and therefore should be a priority […]
Read MoreGlobal Logistics—May 2015
China Picks Pakistan for Trade Corridor China’s "global diplomacy" holds few bounds. From Central and South America to Africa, the country has been aggressively asserting its influence and injecting capital into new infrastructure developments that also pave the way for further commodity sourcing. But China’s impact in Asia is far greater, especially as it relates […]
Read MoreTrends—April 2015
Supply Chain Modeling: Believe It! The supply chain sector is increasingly adapting and deploying technology to better understand the unknown. Big data provides a wealth of information and historical precedent to benchmark and optimize current and future events. Modeling and design software similarly affords users the latitude to engineer and plan for potentialities before they […]
Read MoreGlobal Logistics—April 2015
Larger Ships, Larger Losses? When Maersk Line introduced its Triple-E class of containerships in 2013, it raised the bar for the ocean shipping industry. China Shipping Container Lines and Mediterranean Shipping Company have since brought vessels online that top the 19-thousand TEU threshold. But now France’s CMA CGM SA, the third-largest container line in the […]
Read MoreTrends—March 2015
Learning the ABCs of DCs To be competitive in today’s dynamic retail space, online companies need to rethink distribution networks that were built to serve the brick-and-mortar store model, suggests research conducted by supply chain faculty at the University of Tennessee’s (UT) Haslam College of Business. Supply chain faculty surveyed more than 200 companies, and […]
Read MoreGlobal Logistics—March 2015
Hong Kong: A Space Odyssey Hong Kong is one of the world’s most densely populated cities. Remarkably, only 30 percent of its land is actually developed—a reflection of the area’s mountainous terrain. Hong Kong historically has focused much of its infrastructure development on costly projects to reclaim land from the sea. Accordingly, these constraints have […]
Read MoreGlobal Logistics—August 2014
Only the Good Drive Young With all the talk about the U.S. driver shortage, it’s easy to forget that similar labor constraints exist elsewhere around the world. For example, recruiting younger people into the trucking industry has become a challenge in the United Kingdom, according to Barriers to Youth Employment in the Freight Transport Sector, […]
Read MoreTrends—February 2015
The Jones Act: Time to Change Course? Debate over the Keystone XL Pipeline Act has raised a new regulatory specter. The U.S. maritime industry fears that an amendment recently introduced by U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) will counter the pro-jobs pipeline bill by gutting the Jones Act and existing cabotage regs. The senator’s amendment seeks […]
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