Like my posts of 5.3, 9.2 and 9.24, a picture from a place you’ve heard so much about, but perhaps never seen a picture of, or tried to imagine.
The Suez Canal, like the Straits of Malacca (see post of 9.2), is a great “bottleneck” of global trade, and through it passes approximately 7.5% of the world’s shipped cargo and much of Europe’s oil requirements. The Suez Canal is bigger (in depth and width) than the Panama Canal, and so the latter acts more to set the maximum size for ships–“Panamax.”
Egypt made some $4.1 billion from the Suez Canal tolls in 2007, its third largest source of hard currency after tourism and remittances. Geography matters!
