Resumen de The role of shipping in the ‘second stage of globalisation’
In popular literature, the rapid growth of international trade during the last 50 or 60 years has often been viewed as a direct consequence of shipping technology and the decline of ocean transport costs, but a number of authoritative economists tend to regard certain other variables, such as the general income growth or reductions of customs tariffs, as more plausible explanations. However, typical macroeconomic estimations have a couple of weaknesses that make them insensitive to historical context. First, they pay no regard to the fact that ocean shipping is no homogenous entity but—for example in terms of transport costs—has varied substantially both across sectors and over time. Moreover, the typical macro-level proxy for transport costs, freight factor (the ratio of freight to commodity value), varies so hugely between cheap and expensive commodities that any single average ratio involves an unreasonably high standard deviation. Relying on conventional freight indices and tonnage data, the present article argues that, after the Second World War, the global role of ocean shipping can be interpreted in terms of two different phases. During the first, the focus was in bulk trades. Both in oil and dry-bulk fleets the average vessel sizes trebled and the resulting efficiency gains were reflected in a corresponding decline of freight-rates. This ‘bulk revolution’ came to an end during the so-called great shipping crisis, and the next phase was characterised by the development of liner shipping, the ‘container revolution’. Even in this case the technical development produced substantial efficiency gains but, unlike before, freight-rates only declined modestly. Yet shippers gained indirectly from better, more predictable and secure services—a better value for money. Such quality aspects cannot be measured by freight factors, but common opinion seems to be that, without the rapid growth of container shipping, the outsourcing of Western manufacturing to low-wage countries—as well as the concomitant growth of world trade in 1990–2007—would had been much slower.
