Simon Macadam, at the consultancy Capital Economics, also said any inflationary effect from shipping costs would be “small beer” compared with the much bigger challenge posed by sticky services prices. The spike in freight rates on outbound routes from China was “not representative” of overall global shipping costs, Macadam said, and shipping costs represented only a small fraction of the value of goods. Even if manufacturers had as much pricing power as in the “perfect conditions” of 2021 and 2022, they would pass only half the increase on to consumers, raising inflation by 0.2 percentage points at most.