Shipping Costs, Manufactured Exports, and Economic Growth

TLDR

Geographic proximity to sea and major markets shapes shipping costs, which historically influence the development of international trade and industrial specialization. This study empirically investigates how shipping cost variations among developing countries affect manufactured exports and long‑run economic growth. The analysis shows that lower shipping costs correlate with faster growth in manufactured exports and overall GDP, while high shipping costs hinder export‑led development, force lower wages, and limit the ability of remote countries to emulate East Asian growth patterns.

Abstract

In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith put great stress on the relationship between geographic location and international trade. Smith observed that a more extensive division of labor was likely to develop first along sea coasts and navigable rivers, where transport costs were especially low: As by means of water-carriage a more extensive market is opened to every sort of industry than what land-carriage alone can afford it, so it is upon the sea-coast, and along the banks of navigable rivers, that industry of every kind naturally begins to sub-divide and improve itself, and it is frequently not till a long time after that those improvements extend themselves to the inland part of the country. In this paper authors examine some empirical evidence on differences in shipping costs across developing countries, and its impact on manufactured exports and economic growth. The authors find that geographical considerations, specifically access to the sea and distance to major markets, have a strong impact on shipping costs, which in turn influence success in manufactured exports and long-run economic growth. Countries with lower shipping costs have had faster manufactured export growth and overall economic growth during the past thirty years than country’s with higher shipping costs. The evidence suggests that high-shipping cost countries will find it more difficult to promote export-led development, even if they reduce tariff rates, remove quantitative restrictions, and follow prudent macroeconomic policies. At a minimum, firms in such countries will be forced to pay lower wages to compensate for higher transport costs in order to be able to compete on world markets for manufactures. The required offset in wages might be quite substantial in the usual case for developing countries in which imported inputs constitute a high proportion of the value of exports. In such sectors, high transport costs can easily wipe out export profitability even if wage levels were to fall to zero. As a result, geographically remote countries such as Mongolia, Rwanda, Burundi, Bolivia may not realistically be able to replicate the East Asian model of rapid growth based on the export of labor-intensive manufactes.