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The purpose of this paper is to resolve three problems in ship routing and scheduling systems. Problem 1 is the anticipation of the future cargo transport demand when the shipping models are stochastic based on this demand. Problem 2 is the capacity of these models in processing large number of ships and cargoes within a reasonable time. Problem 3 is the viability of tramp shipping when it comes to real problems.

A commodity-trade forecasting system is developed, an information technology platform is designed and new shipping elements are added to the models to resolve tramp problems of en-route ship bunkering, low-tide port calls and hold-cleaning cost caused by carrying incompatible cargoes.

More realistic stochastic cargo quantity and freight can now be anticipated, larger number of ships and cargoes are now processed in time and shipping systems are becoming more viable.

More support goes to ship owners to make better shipping decisions.

New norms are established in forecasting, upscaling and viability in ship routing and scheduling systems.

Antitrust exemptions to shipping alliances in the liner shipping sector have prevailed for many years. This study aims to examine anti-competition of ocean shipping alliances from a legal perspective of the USA, the European Union (EU) and People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Adopting the standard “doctrinal approach to legal research and analysis” in legal literatures, this paper reviews landmark court cases and legislations in the USA relating to shipping conference system from its beginning to its erosion, followed by its latest transition to non-ratemaking agreements, with discussions on the EU and some PRC treatments on shipping conferences.

Although antitrust exemptions to shipping conferences in the liner shipping sector were eliminated in the trades to/from the USA and the EU, there is a lack of evidence of the deterioration found in the viability of liner shipping carriers in both parts of the world trades. For the USA, shipping alliances will shift the focus to sharing resources for improvement of collective operational efficiencies, whereas the shipper groups in the EU have worried that a protected system of sharing information may lead to price fixing conducts among the carriers.

Through the discussions on the legal treatments of shipping conferences from the USA, the EU and PRC perspectives, this paper provides legal researchers with not only a new research direction on raising collective operational efficiencies through resource sharing but also an insight into shifting their research focus from purely price determination to the area of merger.

This paper reviews landmark court cases and related legislations about the treatments of different regulatory regimes, including the USA, the EU and PRC, to explore the illegitimacy of anti-competition conducts in ocean shipping alliances.

Before describing the methods used by the National Ports Council to forecast UK international trade it will be useful to explain the background to the forecasts, in particular the role of the National Ports Council in the British ports industry, and hence the requirement for the work.

The forecasting power of commodity futures is a matter of intensive research as evidenced by a number of related publications. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how advanced forecasting techniques improve the predictability of sugar futures in the Indian commodity market.

The forward premium is estimated using ordinary least square regression technique. Different linear and nonlinear models are used to forecast the sugar future spot prices from the futures prices. The forecasting accuracy of each pair of models is then compared by estimating the corresponding Diebold-Mariano test statistics.

From the estimated forward premiums, it is found that there is more volatility toward the date of maturity for a three-month horizon compared to six-month, and 12-month horizons. It is established that the futures prices of sugar, when used in a model, are able to generate better forecasts for the future spot prices. Moreover, the forecasting accuracy is found to be better for a shorter futures horizon.

The present study is restricted only to sugar. If sufficient data are available, the same study could be extended to other commodities as well. The findings imply that technical traders would benefit by using advanced forecasting techniques along with futures prices of sugar to determine the expected future spot prices.

The findings in this paper suggest that though simple statistical models may be adopted to relate future spot prices to futures prices, more accurate prediction of the price behavior is possible with advanced forecasting methods like the artificial neural network.

The findings will help market participants such as traders to be better informed about the future spot prices and hence get a better deal.

This is one of the first investigations to assess the predictability of commodity futures by employing advanced forecasting techniques.

In this paper the authors examine evidence on exchange rate predictability through commodity prices for a set of countries categorized as commodity import- and export-dependent developed and emerging countries.

The authors perform in-sample and out-of-sample forecasting analysis. The commodity prices are modeled to predict the exchange rate and to analyze whether this commodity price model can perform better than the random walk model (RWM) or not. These two models are compared and evaluated in terms of exchange rate forecasting abilities based on mean squared forecast error and Theil inequality coefficient.

The authors find that primary commodity prices better predict exchange rates in almost two-thirds of export-dependent developed countries. In contrast, the RWM shows superior performance in the majority of export-dependent emerging, import-dependent emerging and developed countries.

Previous studies examined the exchange rate of commodity export-dependent developed countries mainly. This study examines both developed and emerging countries and finds for which one the changes in prices of export commodities (in case of commodity export-dependent country) or prices of major importing commodities (in case of import-dependent countries) can significantly predict the exchange rate.