DS Experimental statistics >Maritime vessel traffic > block 1 > EN > REVAMP

Why are these statistics needed?

Statistics on port activity and maritime vessel traffic are used to

  • monitor fluctuations in economic activity
  • measure the use of alternative environment-friendly modes of transport
  • evaluate progress in implementing the EU sustainable and smart mobility strategy.

EU countries provide quarterly data on number of maritime vessels arriving at the EU ports (vessel traffic), which are send to Eurostat on an annual basis. The statistics are then published around 1 year later than the reference period of the data. 

Users, and especially policy makers, need these statistics at an earlier time than the current release date to allow capturing timely changes that may arise in vessel traffic due to punctual events, such as closure of Suez Canal, pandemics, taxation.

Why are they experimental?

The use of new data sources, such as the automatic identification system (AIS) and administrative data available to the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA), enable to calculate early estimates of maritime vessel traffic, which are planned to be released within few weeks after the end of the reference period.

This innovative approach has the advantage of improving timeliness of access to data, apart from that it does not add additional burden to respondents.

How are they produced?

The early estimates of maritime vessel traffic are produced using:

  • statistics of previous quarters
  • administrative data from the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA)
  • recent automatic identification system (AIS) data.

The autoregressive integrated moving average model with exogenous variables (ARIMAX) is used to combine the input data and to estimate the statistics for the most recent time period.

For further details, please consult our  methodological note.

Access to the statistics

Data navigation tree

DS Experimental statistics > Maritime vessel traffic > block 2 > EN > REVAMP

Feedback

To help Eurostat improve these experimental statistics, users are kindly invited to give their feedback by email:

  • What have you used this data for?
  • What do you think is the main added value?
  • How do you think we can better match vessel categories of official statistics with the information in AIS signals?