Only 80 merchant ships fly under the American flag in international commerce. Mostly, this is a function of "race to the bottom" regulatory choices.
U.S.-flag merchant ships since 1960:
U.S.-flag merchant ships since 1990:
The leading flags of merchant ships as of 2020 (there have been few major changes since then, although Hong Kong is, of course, a political subdivision of China):
6 comments:
Isn't this mainly due to labor costs? If an Able Seaman can be hired in the Philippines for 10kUSD/y and the US cost is 70kUSD/y and there is no substantial difference in capability, then you would be daft hire the American. With a crew size of 20 (assuming the same savings across rates) that's over a million in saving a year.
it would be zero without the Jones Act.
True that. But 80 vessels is not even a patch on the shipping required to support our economy. We should actually count all the US owned or controlled (but not flagged) vessels and those of our closest allies and or dependencies. Some of the hoops the contractors jump through to build the off-shore wind on the East Coast are silly. Including loading rocks (for pier foundations) into an America barge and then transferring the rocks at sea to a European vessel to emplace the rocks.
In truth, I'm not certain what exactly is driving the numbers. Living in Colorado, I don't have a lot of interaction with the maritime trade economy (although I did handle on Admiralty case arising on the Colorado River when I was working in Grand Junction).
An Admiralty case on the Colorado? I didn't think there was any commercial shipping on the upper Colorado.
By the time that it the Colorado River (fka the Grand River) reached Grand Junction, Colorado, it has become part of the navigable rivers of the United States and is subject to admiralty law. Up in Rocky Mountain National Park, in Colorado, at its source, it is not. The case didn't involve commercial shipping, but did involve a boat related incident on the river.
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