Global Supply Chain Stress Index

The Global Supply Chain Stress Index (GSCSI) is a World Bank measure of disruption in container shipping. Built for the age of containerization, it estimates how much container-ship capacity, counted in twenty-foot equivalent units, is tied up because vessels are taking longer than usual between ports because of congestion, closures or rerouting. The World Bank's trade team developed it in 2021 from ship-tracking data and reports it monthly at global, regional, country and port level.

The name is easily confused with the Global Supply Chain Pressure Index (GSCPI), a separate, broader gauge published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York since January 2022. The GSCPI blends shipping costs, airfreight prices and factory survey data into a score measured in standard deviations, while the GSCSI looks only at container ships and counts physical capacity.

Picture a city's delivery vans. On a normal day each van finishes its route in about the same time. When roads close or traffic jams build up, the vans are still out working, but more of them are stuck at any moment and fewer are free to take new parcels. Counting how many vans are stuck tells you how stressed the delivery system is, even before anyone looks at prices.

The stress index does this for the world's container ships. It compares how long ships are actually taking between ports with how long those trips usually take, and adds up the cargo space trapped by the extra days. A higher number means more ships are effectively out of service, which usually means scarcer space and higher freight rates for anyone trying to move goods.

The GSCSI starts from Automatic Identification System (AIS) data, the position signals that large vessels broadcast, which the World Bank combined with commercial ship-tracking datasets. For each port-to-port leg it sets a historical benchmark lead time. When a ship takes longer than that benchmark, the extra time is treated as delay, and the vessel's capacity during the delay is counted as stalled.

Adding up stalled capacity across ships produces a figure in TEU for each port, country, region and the world. The method is set out in World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 10839, "A Metric of Global Maritime Supply Chain Disruptions" (2024), by Jean-François Arvis, Cordula Rastogi, Jean-Paul Rodrigue and Daria Ulybina. The index covers large container vessels only, so it leaves out bulk carriers, tankers, smaller feeder ships and airfreight.

The GSCSI rose sharply during the pandemic disruption of 2021 and 2022, when port closures in Asia met strong US demand for goods and boxes piled up in the wrong places, worsening the usual imbalance between headhaul and backhaul routes. The resulting shortages fed directly into empty container repositioning costs, longer dwell time at terminals and record demand for container leasing.

A second wave began in late 2023. Drought restricted transits of the Panama Canal, and attacks on merchant ships in the Red Sea pushed many carriers to sail around the Cape of Good Hope rather than through the Suez Canal, one of the best-known examples of a maritime chokepoint. In January 2024 World Bank staff estimated that prolonged rerouting could tie up capacity comparable to the stalled capacity at the 2021 peak, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond noted in May 2025 that the index had stayed high since the Red Sea crisis began.

Stalled capacity matters because it reduces the space available to shippers while demand stays the same, a textbook case of supply and demand. The working paper estimates that each additional 1 million TEU of global stress is associated with a rise of about US$2,300 per TEU in the Shanghai Containerized Freight Index. Higher freight costs flow through to importers, freight forwarders and ultimately consumers, and can show up in measures such as the Consumer Price Index.

For that reason central bank economists watch supply chain gauges alongside other evidence on inflation when setting monetary policy. The Richmond Fed argued that the broader GSCPI is probably the better short-run inflation signal, because the GSCSI's narrow focus makes it react strongly to shocks confined to large container ships.

The two moved together during 2021 and 2022 but diverged afterwards: by 2025 the GSCSI sat near its pandemic-era levels while the GSCPI was close to normal. Readers should check which index a news report means, since some coverage mixes up the names and acronyms. Neither index captures port fees or demurrage charges directly.

• World Bank – Global Supply Chain Stress Index
• Federal Reserve Bank of New York – Global Supply Chain Pressure Index