A statistical assessment of maritime socioeconomic indicators for the European Atlantic area

Abstract

Ever since the introduction into marine and maritime policy strategies worldwide of the relatively new concept of Blue Growth there has been an increasing interest in developing integrated systems of indicators for the maritime economy. The Marnet project has been a recent attempt to develop a comparative maritime socioeconomic framework for the European Atlantic area, and its database contains a large number of socioeconomic indicators for many maritime activities at different territorial levels that provide the information needed to help analyze and compare the maritime economy of the European Atlantic regions. However, there are still many gaps with respect to the spatial and sectoral coverage of the statistical information available. This paper aims to assess the statistical coverage of the main maritime economic sectors in order to contribute to filling these gaps. To help determine where future statistical efforts should focus, the paper gives a list of indicators classified by maritime sectors and activities with information on the degree of territorial coverage of each indicator as measured by the percentage of EU Atlantic regions with data at each territorial level. Based on this information, a list of failed indicators is presented in terms of EU Atlantic countries with no data plus the percentage of Atlantic regions with missing data in the rest of EU countries. Also, a Data Envelopment Analysis based statistical method is proposed to evaluate and compare the relative importance of each maritime sector on the European Atlantic economy. Finally, variation among both sectoral and regional DEA scores is also discussed with the help of a combination of distribution and box-and-whisker plots, as it may offer novel insights into the influence of the maritime economy on the European Atlantic area.