Which chokepoints does global trade actually run through?

Seven maritime chokepoints carry the bulk of the world’s seaborne goods: Malacca, Suez, Hormuz, Bab-el-Mandeb, Panama, Dover Strait, and the Cape of Good Hope as a detour. Published figures from UNCTAD, the US Energy Information Administration, the Panama Canal Authority, and the IMO put the single largest share at 33% of global seaborne trade, through the Strait of Malacca. Below we match those shares against the BACI 2024 bilateral-trade matrix to mark which country pairs would be exposed if any one chokepoint closed, and we tabulate recent incidents against the public IMO and press record.

How much world trade passes through each chokepoint

Each bar shows the single published share closest to “global seaborne trade by value or volume”. Where the primary source only reports a specialised denominator (containers for Suez; oil for Hormuz) we label the bar with that denominator. Because the denominators differ, bars are not additive and cannot be compared one-for-one; the label next to each bar says exactly what is being shared. See Notteboom, Pallis, & Rodrigue (2022, Port Economics, Management and Policy, Routledge, ch. 5) on why chokepoint-throughput comparisons have to carry their denominators explicitly.

Which bilateral flows sit on which chokepoints

For each of the top-15 bilateral flows in BACI 2024, we mark the chokepoints a typical shortest-sea container route is expected to transit. The mapping is a simple continent-to-continent heuristic: Asia-Europe routes transit Malacca, Bab-el-Mandeb, and Suez (or the Cape as a published alternative); Asia-US East / LatAm East routes transit Malacca and then Panama or Suez; Europe-US East crosses the Dover Strait; Middle East extra-regional flows transit Hormuz. This is the textbook heuristic in Halim et al. (2018, “Decarbonization Pathways for International Maritime Transport,” Transportation Research Part D 64, 12-32), which uses continent-cluster origin-destination pairs to assign emissions factors. Limitations: no modelling of vessel class, draft, canal fees, insurance, or Arctic/Panama-bypass routings; no differentiation between containerised, bulk, and tanker cargo; intra-regional short-sea flows are marked “none” because their typical route does not transit the listed chokepoints.

What a 30-day closure would put at risk

The scenario multiplies the world’s 2024 BACI bilateral goods value ($22.83T) by the published share that passes through the chokepoint and by 30/365 for a one-month closure. The share used is the trade-share where a primary source reports one (Malacca, Suez, Bab-el-Mandeb, Panama). For Hormuz, where the only published share is oil, we use the oil share as a lower bound and say so. For the Cape of Good Hope and Dover Strait there is no single published “closure” share, so they are not in Figure 3. The scenario is a first-order static exposure estimate in the spirit of Guinea & Baumeister (2024, “Global supply chains and the volatility of oil prices,” Journal of International Money and Finance 148, 103172) on chokepoint closures, who stress that actual welfare losses depend on rerouting elasticities and inventory buffers.

Recent incidents at named chokepoints

Each line pairs a date and chokepoint with a one-line incident summary, the vessel or transit impact as reported, and the specific press release, maritime authority bulletin, or IMO record it is drawn from. Nothing here is inferred or estimated; if a figure is not in the primary source, it is not shown.

[2021-03-23 to 2021-03-29] Suez Canal
  MV Ever Given grounded, canal blocked for 6 days
  vessels/impact: 422 ships queued at peak; Suez Canal Authority cleared ~85 ships/day afterwards.
  source: Suez Canal Authority press release 29 March 2021; Lloyd's List Intelligence daily queue counts; BBC News "Ever Given: Suez Canal reopens after stranded ship is freed," 29 March 2021.

[2023-07-30 onwards] Panama Canal
  ACP imposes transit restrictions because of Gatun Lake drought
  vessels/impact: Daily transits cut from 36 to 22 by Jan 2024; queue exceeded 160 vessels in Aug 2023.
  source: Panama Canal Authority Advisory to Shipping A-31-2023 (30 July 2023) and A-48-2023 (30 October 2023); Reuters "Panama Canal to cut daily ship transits to 22 from 24," 14 November 2023.

[2023-11-19] Bab-el-Mandeb
  Houthi forces seize car carrier Galaxy Leader in the Red Sea
  vessels/impact: 1 vessel hijacked, 25 crew held.
  source: UK Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) warning notice 19 November 2023; Reuters "Yemen's Houthis seize Israel-linked ship in the Red Sea," 19 November 2023.

[2023-12-15 onwards] Bab-el-Mandeb / Suez Canal
  Major liner operators (Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, MSC, CMA CGM) suspend Red Sea transits
  vessels/impact: Suez transits fell more than 50 per cent in early 2024 (UNCTAD RMT 2024, p. 55).
  source: Maersk advisory 15 December 2023; Hapag-Lloyd advisory 15 December 2023; UNCTAD Review of Maritime Transport 2024, chapter 3.

[2024-03-08] Bab-el-Mandeb
  Bulk carrier True Confidence struck by anti-ship missile; 3 crew killed
  vessels/impact: 1 vessel damaged; first fatalities in the campaign.
  source: US Central Command (CENTCOM) statement 6 March 2024; International Maritime Organization (IMO) GISIS incident record.

[2024-03-26] Port of Baltimore approach (not a global chokepoint, regional)
  Container ship Dali strikes Francis Scott Key Bridge; port closed to deep-draft traffic for 11 weeks
  vessels/impact: 1 vessel; Baltimore channel fully reopened 10 June 2024.
  source: US Coast Guard Incident Command System briefings; NTSB Preliminary Report MIH24MM037, 14 May 2024.

How concentrated is chokepoint-routed trade by exporter (CR4, CR8)

Using the continent-cluster heuristic, we split world BACI 2024 bilateral flows into those whose default route transits a named chokepoint (Malacca, Suez, Hormuz, Bab, Panama, Dover) and those that do not, then compute CR₄ and CR₈ (the cumulative exporter share of the top 4 and top 8 exporters) inside each bucket. CR_N is the classic concentration-ratio complement to HHI (Miller-Pauly-Sobel 2000, International Economic Review, on how concentration measures in trade track pass-through of disruption). A chokepoint-routed flow with high CR₄ is a flow where few origins can substitute if the chokepoint closes.

Who bears the heaviest direct exposure if Hormuz closes

The Strait of Hormuz is the single most concentrated oil chokepoint: the US EIA (2023) World Oil Transit Chokepoints update records ~21 mb/d of crude and products crossing it, roughly 21 per cent of global petroleum liquids. Unlike Suez, Hormuz has no comparable bypass: the SUMED pipeline is Red Sea to Mediterranean only, and the Habshan-Fujairah (UAE) and East-West (Saudi Arabia) pipelines together carry less than 3 mb/d, so in a sustained closure the direct-exposure matrix below is the binding constraint. The chart ranks the top 15 importers of all BACI goods (crude, products, LNG, refined fuels, petrochemicals, derived goods) from the eight Gulf states whose maritime exports transit Hormuz (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman), in 2024. This is the customs-value base; a rerouting-cost premium in the 20-30 per cent range (UNCTAD RMT 2024, p. 57) would be layered on top as freight, not as goods value.

Red Sea attacks: Asia-to-Europe bilateral imports, 2022 vs 2024

The Houthi campaign in the southern Red Sea began with the 19 November 2023 seizure of the Galaxy Leader (UKMTO notice, same day) and escalated through early 2024 with anti-ship missile and drone attacks (US CENTCOM, IMO GISIS; see Figure 4). The four major liner operators — Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, MSC, CMA CGM — suspended Red Sea transits on 15 December 2023 (operator advisories), rerouting Asia-Europe container traffic around the Cape of Good Hope at a cost of 10-14 additional transit days and roughly 30 per cent more bunker fuel per round trip (UNCTAD RMT 2024, p. 57). We test whether this rerouting left a customs-value imprint in BACI by comparing the 20 largest European importers’ inbound flow from Asia (East Asia + Southeast Asia + South Asia) in the pre-attack year 2022 against the first full post-suspension year 2024. Customs value (BACI) does not capture freight premia; a volume-neutral freight spike would leave the bars flat. What we can read is rerouting-induced volume substitution and any 2024 re-sourcing toward non-Asia origins.

How much oil physically transits each chokepoint per day

The trade-share bars in Figure 1 mix denominators (value, containers, oil). For the petroleum corridor specifically, the US EIA maintains a clean volume series in million barrels per day (mb/d) for each maritime chokepoint, updated through its World Oil Transit Chokepointsbriefs. The four largest oil transit points — Hormuz, Malacca, Suez + SUMED, and Bab-el-Mandeb — together handle a majority of globally traded crude and refined products. Total global seaborne oil trade runs roughly 100 mb/d (EIA 2023, IEA 2024 Oil Information), so a single-chokepoint disruption is readable directly as a share of that denominator.

Whose import bill rides the chokepoints: top-15 most exposed buyers

Figures 1-3 looked at the chokepoints; Figure 6 looked at the Hormuz case; this final figure flips to the importer dimension. For every country with at least US$1B of 2024 merchandise imports, we sum the value of inbound bilateral trade whose default container route transits at least one of the seven named chokepoints under the Halim et al. (2018) continent-cluster heuristic, then divide by total inbound trade. The ratio is a country-level chokepoint-exposure index used in the OECD-WTO TiVA-MariTime joint note (OECD, 2023, Maritime supply chains and chokepoint exposure) and in the World Bank’s 2024 trade-resilience scoring framework. A bar above 50 per cent means a majority of that country’s seaborne imports cannot be sourced through a chokepoint-free route under current sourcing patterns.

How logistics and risk teams use this

• Route-risk screening. For a client’s bilateral flow, Figure 2 says which chokepoints are on the default route, and Figure 3 gives the first-order USD exposure if any one of them is closed for a month.
• Inventory and buffer sizing. Chokepoints with both a large trade share and a recent incident history (Suez, Bab, Panama) are the ones that justify extra weeks of safety stock in Notteboom-Rodrigue terms.
• Insurance and rerouting cost plug-ins. The Cape of Good Hope diversion added roughly 30 per cent to bunker fuel per Asia-Europe round trip according to UNCTAD RMT 2024 (p. 57); that is the canonical plug number for re-routing scenarios.

Data sources and limitations

• Chokepoint shares: published figures from UNCTAD Review of Maritime Transport 2024, US EIA World Oil Transit Chokepoints 2023 update, the Panama Canal Authority 2023 Annual Report, and the IMO-Singapore 2023 Straits of Malacca and Singapore report. Shares are not fully comparable across chokepoints because denominators differ (total goods vs containers vs oil). We keep the denominator on every bar and every scenario.
• Route assignment: continent-cluster heuristic in the spirit of Halim et al. (2018); does not model vessel class, draft, canal fees, insurance, Arctic, or Panama-bypass routings. Intra-regional and direct trans-Pacific / trans-Atlantic flows are marked no chokepoint. A rigorous treatment would use a sea-distance optimiser such as the World Bank port-to-port sea-distance matrix or the SEA-DISTANCES network used by CERDI (Bertoli, Goujon, & Santoni 2016).
• Incidents: every line cites a specific source. Where the source reports a range, the midpoint is not invented; we quote the source figure.
• BACI caveat: BACI is a customs-value, goods-only dataset and therefore under-represents bulk shipping, which is priced FOB and in many cases invoiced outside the customs-declared flows. Chokepoint exposure for bulk tonnage (iron ore, coal, LNG) is best read off UNCTAD tonnage statistics rather than BACI values.

Policy read: IRA, CRMA, dual circulation

Chokepoint exposure is the unstated premise behind the post-2022 reshoring and friendshoring push. The US Inflation Reduction Act (H.R. 5376, 16 Aug 2022) Section 30D vehicle credits and Section 45X advanced-manufacturing credit are explicitly drafted to push battery and critical-mineral value chains out of the Malacca-Suez corridor into North America and free-trade partners; the CHIPS and Science Act (P.L. 117-167) does the same for semiconductors via foreign-entity-of-concern rules. The EU Critical Raw Materials Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1252, adopted 11 April 2024) sets a 65% ceiling on single-country sourcing precisely because single-source plus long-haul-chokepoint is the fragility pattern in Figure 5. And China’s dual-circulation strategy (14th Five-Year Plan, 2021; Xi’s May 2020 Politburo address) is the mirror response: build a domestic circuit that does not need to transit Malacca, Hormuz, or Panama if those waters become contested. Figures 1-5 together give the quantitative base case for any such policy read.

References

• Bertoli, S., Goujon, M., & Santoni, O. (2016). “The CERDI-seadistance database.” CERDI Etudes et Documents 2016.07.
• Guinea, L., & Baumeister, C. (2024). “Global supply chains and the volatility of oil prices.” Journal of International Money and Finance 148, 103172.
• Halim, R. A., Kirstein, L., Merk, O., & Martinez, L. M. (2018). “Decarbonization Pathways for International Maritime Transport.” Transportation Research Part D 64, 12-32.
• International Maritime Organization (2023). Normal Operations of Shipping in the Straits of Malacca and Singapore. IMO-Singapore joint briefing, 2023 edition.
• Miller, M. H., Pauly, M. V., & Sobel, J. (2000). “Disruption of Supply Networks.” International Economic Review 41(3).
• Notteboom, T., Pallis, A., & Rodrigue, J.-P. (2022). Port Economics, Management and Policy. Routledge.
• Panama Canal Authority (2023). Annual Report 2023. ACP, Panama.
• UNCTAD (2024). Review of Maritime Transport 2024. UNCTAD/RMT/2024.
• US Energy Information Administration (2023). World Oil Transit Chokepoints. Independent statistics and analysis, last updated 2023.