Maritime Insurance and the Convention on the Carriage of Goods by Sea 1978

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Sets of propositions have been introduced expliciting whether and how the Hamburg Rules would ffect insurance practices among cargo interests since the United Nations first began to work on them. Supporters of the Rules have argued that double insurance and overall insurance costs will be decreased by adopting them. Opponents have asserted that theses costs are higher under the Hamburg Rules than under the Hagueor the Hague-Visby Rules. However, we cannot draw any pursasive conclusions about their ostensible superionrity or inferiority unless we analyze the problem systematically with reliable informations which have not been available as yet. With such limitations in mind, in this paper I exemined the theoretical and constructional effects of the application of the Hamburg Rules on both liability insurance and cargo insurance.
In the light of the review, it is concluded that the Hamburg Rules will not have the dramatic effect on the double insurance problem by efficiently and economically shifting the shipper's risk from the cargo insurer to shipowner's liability insurer in the near future. Instead, if the Hamburh Rules impose heavy libility on the carrier, this will increase double insurance expenses from the standpoint of the total economic system, but it will not affect freight directly for a substantial time. Moreover, it will take considerable time for the Rules to realze its potential to affect the double insurance problem even though they stregthen carriers' liability in the end, and it is for this reason that cargo interests have to trust carriers to render prompt and full compensation. In short, the gap between the ideal of the Hamburg Rules and actual business practices will continue for some time to come.