A growing body of literature has recently focused on the economic origins and consequences of modern maritime piracy and on the perception that the international community has failed to control it. This paper aims to investigate maritime transport costs as one of the channels through which modern maritime piracy could have a major impact on the global economy. A transport-cost equation is estimated using a newly released dataset on maritime transport cost from the OECD together with data on maritime piracy from the IMB. Our results show that maritime piracy significantly increases trade cost between Europe and Asia.