Introduction
It has been estimated that around 90 per cent of the world’s merchandize and commodity trade is
transported by ship. This percentage has remained fairly constant over the last century, yet the
volumes have increased enormously in the last two decades. This rise in global shipping volumes
resulted from what Feenstra (1998) aptly described as the ‘disintegration of production and the
integration of world trade’. As international barriers to trade have effectively been lifted by the
GATT/ WTO-agreements since the 1980s, global manufacturers have vertically disintegrated their
Fordist production systems into geographically dispersed and flexibly organized supply chain
systems. The international trade regime allowed manufacturers to re-locate their production and
assembly plants to more cost-efficient locations in developing economies, in turn generating a new
spatial division of labour (Massey, 1984). Vertical disintegration allowed manufacturers to specialize
and optimize by taking full advantage of ICT in the coordination of the disintegrated production
chain, thus creating economies of scope through the reduction of inventory costs and by means of
outsourcing those parts of the chain with the lowest profit margins. The geographical extension and
dispersion of manufacturing have been conceptualized by development economists as the rise of
Global Value Chains (Kaplinksy, 2004; Gereffi & Korzeniewicz, 1994), by economic geographers as
Global Production Networks (Dicken et al, 2001) and what transport economists would call Global
Supply Chains (Robinson, 2002). Regardless of the conceptualization, it can be stated that this
generic process of economic globalization has increased the demand for global transport services
enormously.