An exploratory study on the Northern Sea Route as an alternative shipping passage

ABSTRACT

This qualitative inductive research explores the potential benefits for the Scandinavian economy and ports through the implementation of the Northern Sea Route (NSR) as an alternative for container shipping to the established Southern route through the Suez Canal. To extract expert’s opinions and address these objectives, we utilised in-depth face-to-face semi-structured interviews through purposive sampling in a single case study setting. The analysis of the data demonstrates that the commercialisation of NSR can yield benefits for the Scandinavian economy (e.g. GDP increase, jobs creation) and reveals the benefits of Scandinavian ports (e.g. ECA’s, flexibility, hinterland, etc.) compared to other ports in North West Europe, which potentially grasp the NSR as an opportunity. However, it is highlighted that this can only be achieved if Scandinavian countries are proactive and secure their involvement.

KEYWORDS:

• NSR
• Scandinavian countries
• alternative trade route
• transhipment hub
• containers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. According to Meng, Zhang, and Xu (2017), old-Panamax is mostly adopted from the literature due to draft restrictions.

2. Norway ranks 6/190 countries, while Russian Federation ranks 40th in the The World Bank (2017); and Norway ranks 6/176 in the Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (Transparency International 2016), while Russian Federation ranks 131.

3. Full version of questionnaires could be provided upon request.