The volume of shipping containers sailing through the Panama Canal is unlikely to return to 2007 pre-crisis boom levels, thanks to changing patterns in global trade and manufacturing and what appears to be the more parsimonious habits of US consumers, according to the canal's chief executive.

Jorge Quijano, chief of the Panama Canal Authority, said US energy and grain exports would help increase traffic on the 100-year-old canal and validate an eight-year, $US5.3 billion expansion now nearing completion. However, the world and the canal were unlikely again to see the sort of booming container trade that characterised the 1990s and early 2000s, he said in an interview with the Financial Times. "That trend has peaked."

The two main reasons for his prediction, Mr Quijano said, were a move by many US companies to bring production closer to home that was contributing to slower growth in global trade, and what appears to have been a change in the behaviour of US consumers since the crisis towards frugality. Yet the US economy is responsible for more than two-thirds of the canal's business.

Changing trade patterns and lower US consumer spending hit traffic. NYT

Mr Quijano's predictions add to the debate about changing patterns of globalisation since the crisis.

For most of the past three decades as part of what some have called an era of "hyperglobalisation", world trade has grown at twice the rate of the global economy. Since the crisis, that has changed. After collapsing in 2009 and recovering in 2010, global trade has settled into a pattern of growing roughly at or below the rate of the world economy.