Liner shipping connectivity index data: who is plugged into the liner networks, delivered

One number per economy-year that answers a deceptively hard question: how well is this country plugged into global container shipping? Not how much cargo it lifts — that is a different dataset — but how much liner service its ports attract. The record that answers it is World Bank – Liner Shipping Connectivity Index: UNCTAD's computation, published through the World Development Indicators as series IS.SHP.GCNW.XQ, scored 9 out of 10 on Datadory's quality rubric. A full pull verifies 2,628 non-null observations across 169 distinct economies and aggregates, spanning 2006–2021, one index reading per economy-year.

Three neighbors extend or sharpen the same question. UNCTADstat Maritime Transport Data Centre is the compiling agency's own shelf, where connectivity sits among 150+ maritime indicators beside fleet and seaborne trade. World Bank – Container Port Traffic (TEU) supplies the volume half of the canonical pair on the same economy-year grain. Natural Earth – World Ports (1:10m Cultural Vectors) drops to geometry with 1,081 verified world-port points for plotting where connectivity actually lives.

Every reading in the panel obeys one base, and getting it wrong is the most common way this series gets misquoted. The WDI panel holds the 2004-maximum-equals-100 scale throughout: China at roughly 100 in the late series means 'as connected relative to the 2004 frontier', not 'the same yardstick as today'. UNCTAD's separately released releases rebase the index to 2018 = 100, and the two versions are not interchangeable mid-series. Cite the base whenever the number appears beside another country's, because a 60 on the 2004 base and a 60 on the 2018 base are different claims about different frontiers.

Two further reading rules follow mechanically. First, nulls mean not published, never zero connectivity — an economy missing from a given year simply has no value that year, and averaging across unfiltered rows drags the panel toward nothing. Second, the index rewards network position rather than domestic demand: a transshipment hub whose berths relay boxes between deep-sea loops scores high because ships, services and capacity concentrate there, which is exactly why the volume companion belongs beside it when the question is how much freight actually lands.

That pairing is the standard correction: read the score against World Bank – Container Port Traffic (TEU) so a rising connectivity line backed by rising TEU reads as structural growth, and a rising line without volume reads as relay traffic passing through.

Eight flat fields, no nesting, one row per economy-year — identity codes, the year, the reading, and a display hint:

# one row = economy x year -- full field set shown
indicator.id       IS.SHP.GCNW.XQ      # WDI series code
indicator.value    Liner shipping connectivity index (maximum value in 2004 = 100)
country.id         YE                  # World Bank two-letter economy code
country.value      Yemen, Rep.
countryiso3code    YEM                 # ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 - the join key
date               2006                # reference year
value              16.6731276695       # the index reading, raw precision
decimal            1                   # recommended display rounding

The Yemen row above is a real observation from the verified pull, not an illustration — and it makes the point the index exists to make: connectivity is measured everywhere liners call, not only where trade reporters are thickest. Every row carries both code systems, the World Bank two-letter code and the ISO alpha-3 code, so joins against either convention run clean without fuzzy matching.

Coverage is wide but not uniform, and the denominators shift between sibling panels. The connectivity record carries non-null values for 169 distinct ISO3 economies and aggregates; the container-throughput panel lists roughly 217 economies and aggregates, of which 207 carry figures; the archived infrastructure-quality panel has at least one observation for about 201 of its ~265 listed entities. Any exercise that assumes one consistent roster will silently mix World Bank regional and income aggregates — East Asia & Pacific sitting in the same table as sovereign states — into rankings of countries.

The fix is mechanical: keep the ISO3 codes rather than display names, tag aggregate rows explicitly at ingest, and filter them out before ranking. Do it once and every downstream chart inherits clean denominators — worth doing when the headline claim is 'Nth most connected economy' and the row underneath is an entire region.

Three records form the entire cross-country tier of the marine ports & services shelf, and they answer three different questions. Connectivity measures network position — how much liner service an economy attracts. Throughput measures handled volume. Perceived infrastructure quality measures what business executives said about the facilities, on a 1–7 scale as a two-year moving average of survey responses — and that series is archived, ending in 2017 with peak coverage of 196 economies in 2013. The table below lines them up so you can pick per project instead of defaulting to whichever series surfaced first.

Market researchers & consultants start market-entry studies from a ranked list of economies that are actually served by mainline networks — one comparable number across 169 economies beats assembling five shipping statistics by hand. Competitive intelligence teams read trajectories to see which national gateway markets are strengthening and which are drifting off the mainline, the backdrop behind every competitor's expansion announcement. Investors & quants take the index as a regressable infrastructure-position factor rather than a research project, usually beside the TEU panel on the same grain. Data scientists get the rare cross-country panel that joins cleanly on two code systems plus a plain year column. Sales & growth teams use whether a market is served by major liner networks as a qualification question answered with a number, not an anecdote. Journalists & academics quote it because each figure traces to a documented five-component method.

Below the national line, the companions take over. BTS Principal Ports maps 150 principal U.S. port polygons carrying CY 2023 tonnage; USACE Waterborne Commerce supplies tonnage, commodity and vessel-trip detail for 1,381 locations (819 ports, 562 waterways) across 2002–2024; Natural Earth's points give the basemap layer. Mind the scope seam: the index is global, while BTS and USACE cover only the United States — use the index to justify why a corridor deserves the deep dive, never expect the layers to reconcile line by line.

The panel is unusually cooperative downstream: dual country keys plus a plain year column join to container throughput, the infrastructure-quality perceptions and the port directories on exact matches rather than name matching. Aggregate rows arrive pre-tagged so regional rollups never reach your ranking logic, and the eight-column shape never moves. Most teams take connectivity beside throughput so position and volume land on one economy-year grain; adding companions later is a settings conversation, not a re-integration project.

Start with a sample: name the economies and years and the extract comes back shaped like your question.

Connectivity is one thread in a wider maritime stack. The marine-ports-services data hub keeps the industry's records ranked, and best marine ports services datasets puts the scorecard in one view. For the volume side of the pair, see container port throughput by country; for congestion and calls at berth grain, port calls congestion data; for the federal U.S. ledger, US port tonnage by commodity; for the builder's view of the whole slice, how developers use marine ports & services data.

Product pages with complete field dictionaries and sample rows: World Bank – Liner Shipping Connectivity Index, World Bank – Container Port Traffic (TEU) and UNCTADstat Maritime Transport Data Centre.