Profitability And Economic Components Of Shipping Via The Arctic Northeast Passage Under Different Shipping Modes And Sensitivity Research

Global warming has become an indisputable fact.According to the "Fifth Synthesis Report" on climate change released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC)in 2014,the average rate of warming in the Arctic will continue to be faster than the average rate of global warming.Global warming and the melting of Arctic sea ice make it possible for humans to develop and utilize Arctic shipping routes.The opening of the Arctic waterway can greatly shorten the shipping distance between Asia,Europe and North America,which has potential economic advantages;at the same time,the extremely cold natural conditions in the Arctic and the existence of sea ice make ships sailing in the Arctic face a series of severe challenges.Therefore,this paper attempts to quantitatively evaluate the profitability of container ships via the Arctic Northeast Passage,so as to provide a theoretical reference for the route selection of Chinese shipping companies.First of all,this paper expounds the background,research significance,research content,innovation points and technical route in the introduction.The literature review in the second chapter mainly sorts out and summarizes the research results on the shipping economy of the Arctic shipping routes at home and abroad,and mainly covers the research on the economic evaluation of the Arctic shipping routes and the research on the influencing factors of the shipping economy in the Arctic waterway.And the relevant theory basis mainly introduces the Monte Carlo Simulation and Unrelated Seemingly Regression.The third chapter qualitatively analyzes the navigation status of the Arctic Northeast Passage and the changes in sea ice.The fourth chapter is based on the third one,and according to the route features of the Northeast Passage,four possible shipping modes for container ships to sail through the Northeast Passage are designed.And use Monte Carlo simulation method to simulate and estimate the single voyage shipping cost and profit of the four different shipping modes.The fifth chapter is based on the single voyage shipping cost and profit estimated by Monte Carlo simulation,as well as the sample data such as economic components,and uses the seemingly-unrelated-regression model to analyze the influence of the components on the profitability of the Northeast Passage under different shipping modes,and analysis and cross-equation tests were performed for the between-group differences in this effect.At the same time,the standardized regression coefficients of each explanatory variable are calculated,the relative importance of each component to the shipping economy is further evaluated,and the breakeven value of each economic component is further estimated,thereby obtaining profit margins of ships with different shipping modes and ice classes.The research conclusion shows that the uncertainty of the economic components makes the single-voyage cost and profit of container ships through the Northeast Passage have a certain fluctuation range.At the same time,the profitability of container shipping via the Northeast Passage varies greatly due to the different shipping modes and ice classes.On average,the single-voyage cost in the direct-Arc4 mode is much lower than that of other modes,and the single-voyage profit is much higher than that of other modes.The sensitivity analysis on the shipping profitability of the Northeast Passage found that the cost factors such as bunker price,the ice-classed ship building cost,single-voyage time,ice-breaking fee rate and number of escort legs were negatively correlated with single-voyage profit,while container freight rate have a positive effect on shipping profits.Among them,the relative importance of number of escort legs to the profitability of the Northeast Passage is the highest,followed by the building cost of ice-classed ships and container freight,while the importance of the annual insurance rate,crew wage and annual maintenance rate is relatively low.At the same time,the study finds that the impacts of the various cost factors considered in the analysis indeed differ greatly across different shipping modes and different ice classes of container ships.The direct mode has a greater profit space than the transshipment mode and the Arc4 class ship has higher profitability than the Arc7 class ship under reasonable assumptions.Moreover,when the container freight rate of the NEP increases by 60% on basis of that of the traditional routes,shipping via the NEP will be profitable.According to the existing research limitations,this paper proposes two future research directions.First,in view of the lack of actual navigation data of ships via the Arctic Northeast Passage,the evaluation of the shipping economy of the Arctic Northeast Passage in this paper can only use Monte Carlo simulation to simulate the navigation.Therefore,future research on the calculation of shipping economy in the Arctic Northeast Passage should focus on the data monitoring,recording and aggregation.Second,the analysis in this paper only considers the private costs of ships sailing through the Northeast Passage,and does not take into account the environmental costs that may arise from ships sailing the Arctic.Therefore,it is an important direction for future research to consider the impact of the negative externalities of ships sailing in the Arctic on the shipping economy of the Northeast Passage.