Assessing impacts to maritime shipping from marine chokepoint closures

Global supply chain disruptions caused by the six-day blockage of the Suez Canal in March 2021 and the reduction in shipping through the Bosporus Strait since the onset of the Ukraine War in February 2022 are recent demonstrations of the critical importance of marine chokepoints to international trade and thus global economic security. To better understand and anticipate effects of a chokepoint closure on global trade, we combine GIS data of international shipping lanes with 2019 bilateral trade data to estimate how the closure of each of eleven chokepoints could change trade flows through other chokepoints and between countries.