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Global Trade Grows but Remains Vulnerable to War and Geopolitics

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New reports from the World Trade Organization and a Washington think tank showed how robust global trade could quickly be derailed by violence.The global system of container ships and tankers that move tens of billions of dollars of products around the world each day mostly functions fluidly and without notice. But in a few parts of the world, shipping lanes shrink to narrow straits or canals, geographical choke points where an isolated disruption can threaten to throw much of international trade out of whack.One of those is the Taiwan Strait, a 100-mile-wide strip of water between Taiwan and mainland China, which has become a critical shipping lane for countries across the globe.New research from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, has found that the strait is a conduit for more than a fifth of the world’s seaborne trade, with $2.45 trillion worth of energy, electronics, minerals and other goods transiting the channel in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available.The findings are significant given that the strait is at the center of a geopolitical dispute between Taiwan and China, which views the island as part of its territory. A blockade or military action from China that halted traffic in the strait could have dramatic implications for the global flow of goods, and the Chinese economy in particular, the researchers say.The estimates come at a moment when geopolitics is upending years of relative complacency about global trade dynamics. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, as well as pandemic-era lockdowns, have reshuffled global trade patterns and alerted consumers to the idea that disruptions in one part of the world can directly affect economic activity in another.In a report also released Thursday, the World Trade Organization said that the pace of global trade has been ticking up, but that rising geopolitical tensions and uncertainty over economic policy could drag it down.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Why the Panama Canal Didn’t Lose Money When Ship Crossings Fell

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    A water shortage forced officials to reduce traffic, but higher fees increased revenue.Low water levels have forced officials to slash the number of ships that are allowed through the Panama Canal, disrupting global supply chains and pushing up transportation costs.But, remarkably, the big drop in ship traffic has not — at least so far — led to a financial crunch for the canal, which passes on much of its toll revenue to Panama’s government.That’s because the canal authority introduced hefty increases in tolls before the water crisis started. In addition, shipping companies have been willing to pay large sums in special auctions to secure one of the reduced number of crossings.In the 12 months through September, the canal’s revenue rose 15 percent, to nearly $5 billion, even though the tonnage shipped through the canal fell 1.5 percent.The Panama Canal Authority declined to say how much money it earned from auctions. At a maritime conference last week in Stamford, Conn., Ilya Espino de Marotta, the canal’s deputy administrator, said the auction fees, which reached as much as $4 million per passage last year, “helped a little bit.”But even now, during a quieter season for global shipping, auction fees can double the cost of using the canal. This month, Avance Gas, which ships liquefied petroleum gas, paid a $401,000 auction fee and $400,000 for the regular toll, said Oystein Kalleklev, the company’s chief executive. Auction fees are ultimately borne by the company whose goods are being shipped.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    War Has Already Hurt the Economies of Israel’s Nearest Neighbors

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    The impact on global growth of the Middle East violence has so far been contained. That’s not the case for Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan, which were already struggling.In the Red Sea, attacks by Iranian-backed Houthi militants on commercial ships continue to disrupt a crucial trade route and raise shipping costs. The threat of escalation there and around flash points in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and now Iran and Pakistan ratchets up every day.Despite the staggering death toll and wrenching misery of the violence in the Middle East, the broader economic impact so far has been mostly contained. Oil production and prices, a critical driver of worldwide economic activity and inflation, have returned to pre-crisis levels. International tourists are still flying into other countries in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.Yet for Israel’s next-door neighbors — Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan — the economic damage is already severe.An assessment by the United Nations Development Program estimated that in just three months, the Israel-Gaza war has cost the three countries $10.3 billion, or 2.3 percent of their combined gross domestic product. An additional 230,000 people in these countries are also expected to fall into poverty.Iranian-backed Houthi militants have been attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea.Sayed Hassan/Getty Images“Human development could regress by at least two to three years in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon,” the analysis warned, citing refugee flows, soaring public debt and declines in trade and tourism — a vital source of revenue, foreign currency and employment.That conclusion echoed an update last month by the International Monetary Fund, which said that it was certain to lower its forecast for the most exposed countries when it publishes its World Economic Outlook at the end of this month.The latest economic gut punches could not come at a worse time for these countries, said Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma.Economic activity across the Middle East and North Africa was already on a down slide, slipping to 2 percent growth in 2023 from 5.6 percent the previous year. Lebanon has been enmeshed in what the World Bank calls one of the world’s worst economic and financial crises in more than a century and half. And Egypt has been on the brink of insolvency.Since Hamas fighters attacked Israel from Gaza on Oct. 7, about 25,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel, according to the Gazan health ministry. The strip has suffered widespread destruction and devastation. In Israel, where the Hamas attacks killed about 1,200 people, according to officials, and resulted in 240 being taken hostage, life has been upended, with hundreds of thousands of citizens called into military service and 200,000 displaced from border areas.In Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt, uncertainty about the war’s course is eating away at consumer and business confidence, which is likely to drive down spending and investment, I.M.F. analysts wrote.Rising prices in Egypt continue to gnaw at households’ buying power.Mauricio Lima for The New York TimesEgypt, the Arab world’s most populous country, has still not recovered from the rise in the cost of essential imports like wheat and fuel, a plunge in tourist revenue, and a drop in foreign investment caused by the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine.Lavish government spending on showy megaprojects and weapons caused Egypt’s debt to soar. When central banks around the world raised interest rates to curb inflation, those debt payments ballooned. Rising prices within Egypt continue to gnaw away households’ buying power and business’s plans for expansion.“No one wants to invest, but Egypt is too big to fail,” Mr. Landis said, explaining that the United States and I.M.F. are unlikely to let the country default on its $165 billion of foreign loans given its strategic and political importance.The drop in shipping traffic crossing into the Red Sea from the Suez Canal is the latest blow. Between January and August, Egypt brought in an average of $862 million per month in revenue from the canal, which carries 11 percent of global maritime trade.James Swanston, an emerging-markets economist at Capital Economics, said that according to the head of the Suez Canal Authority, traffic is down 30 percent this month from December and revenues are 40 percent weaker compared to 2023 levels.“That’s the biggest spillover effect,” he said.For these three struggling economies, the drop in tourism is particularly alarming. In 2019 tourism in Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan accounted for 35 percent to nearly 50 percent of their combined goods and services exports, according to the I.M.F.Displaced Palestinians on their way from the north of the Gaza Strip to its south last year.Samar Abu Elouf for The New York TimesIn early January, confirmed tickets for international arrivals to the wider Middle East region for the first half of this year were 20 percent higher than they were last year, according to ForwardKeys, a data-analysis firm that tracks global air travel reservations.But the closer the fighting, the bigger the decline in travelers. Tourism to Israel has mostly evaporated, further hammering an economy upended by full-scale war.In Jordan, airline bookings were down 18 percent. In Lebanon, where Israeli troops are fighting Hezbollah militants along the border, bookings were down 25 percent.“Fears of further regional escalation are casting a shadow over travel prospects in the region,” Olivier Ponti, vice president of insights at ForwardKeys.In Lebanon, travel and tourism has previously contributed a fifth of the country’s yearly gross domestic product.“The number one site in Lebanon is Baalbek,” said Hussein Abdallah, general manager of Lebanon Tours and Travels in Beirut. The sprawling 2,000-year-old Roman ruins are so spectacular that visitors have suggested that djinns built a palace there for the Queen of Sheba or that aliens constructed it as an intergalactic landing pad.Now, Mr. Abdallah said, “it is totally empty.” Mr. Abdallah said that since Oct. 7, his bookings have dropped 90 percent from last year. “If the situation continues like that,” he said, “many tour operators in Beirut will go out of business.”Travel to Egypt also dropped in October, November and December. Mr. Landis at the Middle East Center in Oklahoma mentioned that even his brother canceled a planned trip down the Nile, choosing to vacation in India instead.The top tourist site in Lebanon is the 2,000-year-old Roman ruins of Baalbek, said Hussein Abdallah, general manager of Lebanon Tours and Travels in Beirut. Now, he said, “it is totally empty.”Mohamed Azakir/ReutersKhaled Ibrahim, a consultant for Amisol Travel Egypt and a member of the Middle East Travel Alliance, said cancellations started to pour in after the attacks began. Like other tour operators he offered discounts to popular destinations like Sharm el-Sheik at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, and occupancy hit about 80 percent of normal.He is less sanguine about salvaging the rest of what is considered the prime tourist season. “I can say this winter, January to April, will be quite challenging,” Mr. Ibrahim said from Medina in Saudi Arabia, where he was leading a tour. “Maybe business drops down to 50 percent.”Jim Tankersley More

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    Drought Saps the Panama Canal, Disrupting Global Trade

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    For over a century, the Panama Canal has provided a convenient way for ships to move between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, helping to speed up international trade.But a drought has left the canal without enough water, which is used to raise and lower ships, forcing officials to slash the number of vessels they allow through. That has created expensive headaches for shipping companies and raised difficult questions about water use in Panama. The passage of one ship is estimated to consume as much water as half a million Panamanians use in one day.“This is the worst we have seen in terms of disruption,” said Oystein Kalleklev, the chief executive of Avance Gas, which transports propane from the United States to Asia.The problems at the Panama Canal, an engineering marvel that opened in 1914 and handles an estimated 5 percent of seaborne trade, is the latest example of how crucial parts of global supply chains can suddenly seize up. In 2021, one of the largest container ships ever built got stuck for days in the Suez Canal, choking off trade. And the huge demand for goods like surgical masks, home appliances and garden equipment during the pandemic strained supply chains to their breaking point.Before the water problems, the canal handled some 38 ships a day. In July the authorities cut that to 32 vessels.Fewer passages could deprive Panama of tens of millions of dollars in revenue, push up the cost of shipping and increase greenhouse gas emissions when ships travel longer routes.In Panama, a lack of water has hampered canal operations in recent years, and some shipping experts say vessels may soon have to avoid the canal altogether if the problem gets worse. Fewer passages could deprive Panama’s government of tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue, push up the cost of shipping and increase greenhouse gas emissions when ships travel longer routes.Though Panama has an equatorial climate that makes it one of the wettest countries, rainfall there has been 30 percent below average this year, causing water levels to plunge in the lakes that feed the canal and its mighty locks. The immediate cause is the El Niño climate phenomenon, which initially causes hotter and drier weather in Panama, but scientists believe that climate change may be prolonging dry spells and raising temperatures in the region.Before the water problems, as many as 38 ships a day moved through the canal, which was built by the United States and remained under its control until 2000. The canal authority in July cut the average to 32 vessels, and later announced that the number would drop to 31 on Nov. 1. Further reductions could come if water levels remain low. The canal authority is also limiting how far a ship’s hull can go below the water, known as its draft, which significantly reduces the weight it can carry.Container ships, which transport finished consumer goods, typically reserve passage well in advance, and have not faced long delays. But ships carrying bulk commodities generally don’t book passage.Tree trunks are visible due to low levels of water. The drought also presents tough choices for Panama’s leaders, who must balance the water needs of the canal with those of residents.Vessels waiting to cross the Panama Canal. The passage of one ship is estimated to consume as much water as half a million Panamanians use in one day.This presents bulk shipping companies with an expensive calculus: They can risk waiting for days, pay a big fee to jump the line or avoid the canal entirely by taking a longer route.Mr. Kalleklev, the shipping executive, said his company decided in August to pay $400,000 in a special auction to move a ship ahead in the queue, roughly doubling the total cost of using the canal. Other companies have paid over $2 million, a cost they will sometimes bear to ensure ships don’t miss their next assignment. A portion of these extra costs will be passed on to consumers, already pummeled by inflation.The pain, however, has been limited because the U.S. economy is not running very hot and demand for imported goods is relatively muted.“If this was a year ago, when we still had record high freight rates and consumers still spending a lot on containerized goods from the Far East, then you would see more drama than you have now,” said Peter Sand, chief analyst at Xeneta, a shipping market analytics company.But traffic through the canal is likely to remain at lower levels in the coming months. Reducing passages helps conserve water, because huge amounts are used up every time a ship goes through the locks as it travels the 40 miles across Panama.The drought also presents tough choices for Panama’s leaders, who must balance the water needs of the canal with those of residents, over half of whom rely on the same sources of water that feed the canal.The canal’s board recently proposed building a new reservoir in the Indio River to bolster the water supply and increase traffic through the canal, which generates over 6 percent of Panama’s gross domestic product. Under the plan, the new water supply could allow for an additional 12 to 15 passages daily.For over a century, the Panama Canal has provided a convenient way for ships to move between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.The canal’s board recently proposed building a new reservoir in the Indio River to bolster the water supply and increase traffic through the canal.“In optimal terms, the canal can handle 38 transits per day, so 12 to 15 is a lot,” said Rodrigo Noriega, a lawyer and a columnist for Panama’s La Prensa newspaper.Building the reservoir is expected to cost nearly $900 million, and the canal authority could start accepting bids from contractors toward the middle of next year with construction starting early in 2025. But that timeline could well be delayed; the construction of larger locks was completed two years late, in 2016, and that project was marred by cost disputes.The new reservoir would also involve acquiring land that is protected by a 2006 law, and displace at least some of its inhabitants. Mr. Noriega said he expected Panama’s legislature to pass a law that would lift the ban on acquiring land. But he and others note that new water sources could also be built in other places.Without a new water source, the canal could lose significant amounts of business. Other ocean routes are, of course, longer and more expensive, but they are less likely to have unpredictable delays. One alternative is to transport goods between Asia and United States through the Suez Canal to the East Coast and Gulf Coast. Another is to ship goods from Asia to the West Coast ports — and then transport them overland by train or truck.“In theory, something that offers a cheaper, shorter route should always be in favor, but it’s the uncertainty that can be a killer,” said Chris Rogers, head of supply chain research at S&P Global Market Intelligence.Protracted disruptions at the canal could stoke interest in building land routes in Mexico, Colombia and other countries that have coastlines on both oceans, said Richard Morales, a political economist who is running as an independent candidate for vice president in an election next year.The efforts to secure new water supplies could be a race against climate change.Because interest in building a canal dates to the 19th century, Panama has rainfall records going back some 140 years. That gives scientists more confidence when concluding that a weather change is a permanent shift and not merely random, said Steven Paton, a director of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s Physical Monitoring Program on an island in Lake Gatun, which makes up a large part of the canal and supplies most of its water.He said that while scientists were unsure about climate change’s impact on El Niño, two of the driest El Niño periods of the last 140 years had occurred in the last quarter-century, and that the current one could be the third.“It doesn’t say that this is climate change,” Mr. Paton said, “but it does say that this is wholly consistent with almost all of the climate change models.”Sol Lauría More

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    Suez Canal Is Open, but the World is Still Full of Giant Container Ships

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    As global trade has grown, shipping companies have steadily increased ship sizes — but the Suez Canal blockage showed that bigger is not always better.The traffic jam at the Suez Canal will soon begin easing, but behemoth container ships like the one that blocked that crucial passageway for almost a week and caused headaches for shippers around the world aren’t going anywhere.Global supply chains were already under pressure when the Ever Given, a ship longer than the Empire State Building and capable of carrying furnishings for 20,000 apartments, wedged itself between the banks of the Suez Canal last week. It was freed on Monday, but left behind “disruptions and backlogs in global shipping that could take weeks, possibly months, to unravel,” according to A.P. Moller-Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company.The crisis was short, but it was also years in the making.For decades, shipping lines have been making bigger and bigger vessels, driven by an expanding global appetite for electronics, clothes, toys and other goods. The growth in ship size, which sped up in recent years, often made economic sense: Bigger vessels are generally cheaper to build and operate on a per-container basis. But the largest ships can come with their own set of problems, not only for the canals and ports that have to handle them but for the companies that build them.“They did what they thought was most efficient for themselves — make the ships big — and they didn’t pay much attention at all to the rest of the world,” said Marc Levinson, an economist and author of “Outside the Box,” a history of globalization. “But it turns out that these really big ships are not as efficient as the shipping lines had imagined.”Despite the risks they pose, however, massive vessels still dominate global shipping. According to Alphaliner, a data firm, the global fleet of container ships includes 133 of the largest ship type — those that can carry 18,000 to 24,000 containers. Another 53 are on order.The world’s first commercially successful container trip took place in 1956 aboard a converted steamship, which transported a few dozen containers from New Jersey to Texas. The industry has grown steadily in the decades since, but as global trade accelerated in the 1980s, so did the growth of the shipping industry — and ship size.One container ship among many that were anchored in February outside the Port of Los Angeles, where congestion kept ships waiting to unload for days.  Coley Brown for The New York TimesIn that decade, the average capacity of a container ship grew 28 percent, according to the International Transport Forum, a unit of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Container ship capacity grew an additional 36 percent in the 1990s. Then, in 2006, Maersk introduced the Emma Maersk, a massive vessel that could hold about 15,000 containers, almost 70 percent more than any other vessel.“Instead of this pattern of small increases in capacity over time, all of a sudden we had a quantum leap, and that really set off an arms race,” Mr. Levinson said.Today, the largest ships can hold as many as 24,000 containers — a standard 20-foot box can hold a pair of midsize sport utility vehicles or enough produce to fill one or two grocery store aisles.The growth of the shipping industry and ship size has played a central role in creating the modern economy, helping to make China a manufacturing powerhouse and facilitating the rise of everything from e-commerce to retailers like Ikea and Amazon. To the container lines, building bigger made sense: Larger ships allowed them to squeeze out savings on construction, fuel and staffing.“Ultra Large Container Vessels (U.L.C.V.) are extremely efficient when it is about transporting large quantities of goods around the globe,” Tim Seifert, a spokesman for Hapag-Lloyd, a large shipping company, said in a statement. “We also doubt that it would make shipping safer or more environmentally friendly if there would be more or less-efficient vessels on the oceans or in the canals.”Maersk said it was premature to blame Ever Given’s size for what happened in the Suez. Ultra-large ships “have existed for many years and have sailed through the Suez Canal without issues,” Palle Brodsgaard Laursen, the company’s chief technical officer, said in a statement on Tuesday.But the growth in ship size has come at a cost. It has effectively pitted port against port, canal against canal. To make way for bigger ships, for example, the Panama Canal expanded in 2016 at a cost of more than $5 billion.That set off a race among ports along the East Coast of the United States to attract the larger ships coming through the canal. Several ports, including those in Baltimore, Miami and Norfolk, Va., began dredging projects to deepen their harbors. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey spearheaded a $1.7 billion project to raise the Bayonne Bridge to accommodate mammoth ships laden with cargo from Asia and elsewhere.Three large cranes arrived at the Port of Oakland in January, allowing it to receive the biggest ships in North America.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesThe race to accommodate ever-larger ships also pushed ports and terminal operators to buy new equipment. This month, for example, the Port of Oakland erected three 1,600-ton cranes that would, in the words of one port executive, allow it to “receive the biggest ships.”But while ports incurred costs for accommodating larger ships, they didn’t reap all of the benefits, according to Jan Tiedemann, a senior analyst at Alphaliner.“The savings are almost exclusively on the side of the carrier, so there was an argument that the carriers have been in the driving seat and have just pushed through with this big tonnage, while terminal operators, ports and, in some cases, the taxpayer have footed the bill,” he said.The shift to bigger ships also coincided with and contributed to industry consolidation that has both limited competition among shipping giants and made the world more vulnerable to supply disruptions. Buying and maintaining large vessels is expensive, and shippers that couldn’t afford those costs had to find ways to become bigger themselves. Some firms merged, and others joined alliances that allowed them to pool their ships to offer more frequent service.Those trends aren’t necessarily all bad. The alliances allow shippers to offer expanded service and help keep costs low for customers. And the fact that bigger ships cut fuel costs has helped the industry make the case that it is doing its part to reduce planet-warming emissions.But the argument for even bigger ships may finally be fading, even for container lines themselves — a concept known in economics as the law of diminishing returns.For one, the benefits of building bigger tend to shrink with each successive round of growth, according to Olaf Merk, the lead author of a 2015 International Transport Forum report on very big ships. According to the report, the savings from moving to ships that can carry 19,000 containers were four to six times smaller than those realized by the previous expansion of ship size. And most of the savings came from more efficient ship engines than the size of the ship.“There’s still economies of scale, but less and less as the ships become bigger,” Mr. Merk said.The bigger vessels can also call on fewer ports and navigate through fewer tight waterways. They are also harder to fill, cost more to insure and pose a greater threat to supply chains when things go wrong, like Ever Given’s beaching in the Suez Canal. Giant ships are also designed for a world in which trade is growing rapidly, which is far from guaranteed these days given high geopolitical and economic tensions between the United States and China, Britain and the European Union, and other large trading partners. More