How to understand without clause

Question

In this sentence: "Several countries continue to subsidize a limited number of shipping services, without which subsidies many islands would receive no or only infrequent visits.", (and many more similar sentences i can find on the internet), why the second "subsidies" is needed in the clause? "without which many islands would receive no or only infrequent visits." or "without those subsidies many islands would receive no or only infrequent visits." sounds more reasonable to me.

Answer 1

The second subsidies clarifies what the "which" refers to since there are multiple nouns preceding the "which".

Answer 2

Zang, I would agree with replacing the wrong pronoun which with the correct pronoun those as you did, but the two independent sentences need a conjunction; otherwise there's a comma splice.

Several countries continue to subsidize a limited number of shipping services, but without

those subsidies many islands would receive only infrequent visits or none.

In addition, the prepositional phrase (without those subsidies) shows that subsidies is the noun

object of the preposition --without; therefore, it can't be the noun subject of the sentence and vice versa.