The Box - Marc Levinson [190]
41. Lloyd’s Shipping Economist, various issues; Hans J. Peters, “The Commercial Aspects of Freight Transport: Ocean Transport: Freight Rates and Tariffs,” World Bank Infrastructure Notes, January 1991; author’s interview with William Hubbard.
Chapter 14
Just in Time
1. Paul Lukas, “Mattel: Toy Story,” Fortune Small Business, April 18, 2003; Holiday Dmitri, “Barbie’s Taiwanese Homecoming,” Reason, May 2005. For discussion of the toy industry’s supply chains, see Francis Snyder, “Global Economic Networks and Global Legal Pluralism,” European University Institute Working Paper Law No. 99/6, August 1999.
2. This description of just-in-time procedures is taken from G.J.R. Linge, “Just-in-Time: More or Less Flexible?” Economic Geography 67, no. 4 (1991): 316–332.
3. The counts, drawn from approximately a thousand business and management periodicals, are taken from Paul D. Larson and H. Barry Spraggins, “The American Railroad Industry: Twenty Years after Staggers,” Transportation Quarterly 52, no. 2 (2000): 37; Robert C. Lieb and Robert A. Miller, “JIT and Corporate Transportation Requirements,” Transportation Journal 27, no. 3 (1988): 5–10; author’s interview with Cliff Sayre.
4. According to calculations based on the U.S. National Income and Product Accounts, private nonfarm inventories in 2004 averaged about $1.65 trillion, or about 13 percent of final sales. Through the early 1980s, the ratio was in the range of 22 to 25 percent. That 9 percentage point reduction measured against 2004 final sales of $12.2 trillion yields an annual saving approaching $1.1 trillion. An alternative measurement examines the average length of time goods are held in inventory by retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers. Analyzed in this way, if inventories had risen at the same rate as sales since the early 1980s, U.S. department and discount stores would have kept an additional $30 billion of stock on average during 2000, durable goods manufacturers would have held an additional $240 billion of inventories, manufacturers of nondurables would have had inventories about $40 billion higher than the actual number, and wholesale inventories might have been $30–$40 billion higher. This method yields a decline in average inventories relative to sales in these sectors of more than $400 billion. See U.S. Census Bureau, Monthly Retail Trade Report, and Hong Chen, Murray Z. Brank, and Owen Q. Wu, “U.S. Retail and Wholesale Inventory Performance from 1981 to 2003,” Working Paper, University of British Columbia, 2005.
5. On earlier forms of globalization, see Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, MA, 1999), and O’Rourke and Williamson, “When Did Globalization Begin?” Working Paper 7632, NBER, April 2000.
6. Robert Feenstra, “Integration of Trade and Disintegration of Production in the Global Economy,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 12, no. 4 (1998); Rabach, “By Sea,” p. 203.
7. David Hummels, “Toward a Geography of Trade Costs,” mimeo, University of Chicago, January 1999; Will Martin and Vlad Manole, “China’s Emergence as the Workshop of the World,” Working Paper, World Bank, September 2003.
8. Ximena Clark, David Dollar, and Alejandro Micco, “Port Efficiency, Maritime Transport Costs, and Bilateral Trade,” Journal of Development Economics 74, no. 3 (2004): 417–450.
9. Erie, Globalizing L.A., p. 208; Miriam Dossal Panjwani, “Space as Determinant: Neighbourhoods, Clubs and Other Strategies of Survival,” in Davies et al., Dock Workers, 2:759; Robin Carruthers, Jitendra N. Bajpai, and David Hummels, “Trade and Logistics: An East Asian Perspective,” in East Asia Integrates: A Trade Policy Agenda for Shared Growth (Washington, DC, 2003), pp. 117–137.
10. David Hummels, “Time as a Trade Barrier,” mimeo, Purdue University, July 2001.
11. Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, 2002), p. 232.
12. Clark,