When shipping technology changes, who does it make rich?
The Wind of Change: Maritime Technology, Trade, and Economic Development
Luigi Pascali (2017) · American Economic Review 107(9)
Article ↗ · Replication data ↗ (openICPSR)
The archive requires an account we do not hold, so the files were not opened. What follows rests on the published abstract and on this platform's own observations.
What the authors found
Pascali uses the transition from sail to steam in the nineteenth century as a natural experiment: steamships made trade routes independent of prevailing winds, so countries that had been favoured by wind patterns lost their advantage and others gained. The striking result is that the resulting trade expansion raised income only where institutions were already good; elsewhere it did not, and in some cases coincided with worse outcomes. Trade openness was not sufficient for development.
What our data adds
The successor to Pascali's wind patterns is the set of maritime chokepoints this database tracks daily through IMF PortWatch — Suez, Panama, Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, Malacca. Where sail-era geography was set by wind, today's is set by five canals and straits whose closure reroutes global trade within days, as the Red Sea diversions after 2023 demonstrated. The mechanism the paper identifies has not gone away; it has been concentrated into a handful of points that can be watched in near real time rather than diffused across an ocean.
| Figure | Value | Indicator |
|---|---|---|
| Maritime chokepoints tracked daily | 5+ | capacity |
| Institutional measures in this database | none | capacity |
Every figure here is computed from observations in this database and can be charted, downloaded or queried.
What this cannot show
The paper's result is that institutions conditioned the gains from trade, and this database holds no institutional measures — no governance indicators, no rule-of-law index, nothing that could stand in for the variable doing the work. That was not for want of trying: the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators are listed in its indicator catalogue and return no data through the indicator API on any source id, the same failure mode as the archived refugee series. They are recorded in the source register as needing their own route. The chokepoint parallel above is an analogy offered for the reader's judgement, not a finding.