The Trade Consequences of Maritime Insecurity: Evidence from Somali Piracy

Alfredo Burlando, Anca D. Cristea and Logan M. Lee

Review of International Economics, 2015, vol. 23, issue 3, 525-557

Abstract: In the past decade (2000–2010), pirates from Somalia have carried out thousands of attacks on cargo ships sailing through the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, causing what others have identified as significant damage to maritime trade. In this paper, we use variations in the spread and intensity of Somali piracy to estimate its effect on the volume of international trade. By comparing trade volume changes along shipping routes located in pirate waters to those that are not, we estimate that Somali piracy reduced bulk commodities trade passing through the Gulf of Aden by 4.1% per year from 2000 to 2010. We find smaller reductions in total trade, consistent with the fact that not all goods are shipped by sea or are targets of pirate attacks. While our estimates suggest that the trade costs of piracy are much lower than what has been suggested in the existing literature, we find that they remain significant and unevenly distributed, with five countries and the EU shouldering 70% of the total costs.

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/roie.12183 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Trade Consequences of Maritime Insecurity: Evidence from Somali Piracy (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:reviec:v:23:y:2015:i:3:p:525-557

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0965-7576

Access Statistics for this article

Review of International Economics is currently edited by E. Kwan Choi

More articles in Review of International Economics from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().