Global shipping credited in new book for lifting billions out of poverty

Time:2013-01-05 Browse:50 Author:RISINGSUN
THE global shipping industry with its 86,000 ships carries more than nine billion tons of cargo each year and has played a key role in transporting 90 per cent of the world`s food, products and energy while helping to transform the global economy along the way, says a Forbes book review.

It said these facts are brought home in a new book by Lori Ann LaRocco called, "Dynasties of the Sea: The Shipowners and Financiers Who Expanded the Era of Free Trade".


Ms LaRocco, who is the senior talent producer at CNBC, teams up with Matthew McCleery, Martin Stopford, and Lawrence Lindsey - all veterans of the industry - to pull together insight into the impact that shipping has on all of our lives.
 

As a whole, the shipping business has lifted a billion people out of poverty over the past 15 years alone, has fed half the world and kept the other half warm, and has "raised the standard of living virtually everywhere by shuttling products and commodities from where they`re most efficiently produced to where they`re most profitably consumed, it reports.


In a "perfect market" like shipping, in which brutal competition, chronic overcapacity and a reliable flow of destabilising events conspire to give the industry the lowest cycle-to-cycle financial returns with the highest inter-cycle volatility of any asset-intensive industry, one might be tempted to conclude that the business would do nothing but destroy capital. But the fact is that shipping has contributed to more fortunes than any other business except technology, it said.


The book also includes interviews with and profiles on 21 shipping entrepreneurs from all over the world, including shipowners, logistics specialists, and the financiers who provide the capital to make it all run smoothly.


"Without the effective container-shipping network, you can forget about Walmart, forget about globalisation, and you can also forget about China being the global manufacturing centre," says Hong Kong`s Gerry Wang, CEO of Seaspan Corp.