Determinants of Maritime Transport Costs

By A. Micco, Natalia Pérez. 2002

1,026 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent literature has emphasized the importance of transport costs and infrastructure in explaining trade, access to markets, and increases in per capita income. For most Latin American countries, transport costs are a greater barrier to U.S. markets than import tariffs. The authors investigate the determinants of shipping costs to the U.S. with a large database of more than 300,000 observations per year on shipments of products at the six-digit HS level from different ports around the world. In addition, the authors find that efficiency of ports is an important determinant of shipping costs. Inefficient ports also increase handling costs, which are one of the components of shipping costs. The authors try to explain variations in port efficiency and find that they are linked to excessive regulation, the prevalence of organized crime, and the general condition of the country's infrastructure. Finally, the authors present a number of success stories in Latin America to show that private involvement in port management leads to efficiency and lower costs whenever it is accompanied by labor reform, and when monopoly power is reduced through either regulation or competition.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/178274df8bdb7d9f919750cf539f42c72cacd0fb

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Citations in the corpus

Melting Ice Caps and the Economic Impact of Opening the Northern Sea Route (2018, background): “23A series of papers find that the elasticity of shipping costs to distance is around 0.2 (Radelet and Sachs, 1998; Fink et al., 2000; Limão and Venables, 2001; Micco and Pérez, 2002; Clark et al., In Table 4 we present a summary of the transport cost reductions.”
Cost Heterogeneity and the Potential Savings from Market-Based Policies (2002, methodology): “Using an econometric approach, with vastly greater data requirements, Carlson et al. (2000) estimated the potential cost savings for this program at about 43%.”
The design of environmental markets: What have we learned from experience with cap and trade? (2017, background): “That said, costs were at least 15 per cent below and perhaps as much as 90 per cent below costs of various counterfactual policies (Carlson et al., 2000; Ellerman et al., 2000; Keohane, 2003).”
Allowance Price Drivers in the First Phase of the EU ETS (2010, background): “[13, 14, 15, 16, 17] and more recently [18, 19], to name only a few.”
Clearing the Air? The Effects of Gasoline Content Regulation on Air Quality † (2011, background): “Curtis Carlson et al. (2000), for example, find evidence of substantial abatement cost reductions stemming from trading of sulfur dioxide permits.”