The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (ASD), the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Climate Agreement have emphasized the need for all economic sectors, including maritime transport to monitor and measure performance and track progress towards the achievement of relevant economic, social and environmental targets.
Indicators measuring the performance of the maritime transport sector with multidimensional metrics spanning a range of factors (e.g. efficiency, cost-effectiveness, productivity, profitability, connectivity, access, social inclusiveness and environmental sustainability) are increasingly recognized as critical for maritime business and its users, as well as for governments and policy makers.
As developing key indicators depends heavily on the availability and the quality of data and statistics, addressing existing maritime transport data gaps requires investing in acquiring, compiling, making available and managing relevant data.
Against this background the UNCTAD secretariat conveyed an ad hoc expert meeting on “Measuring Shipping Connectivity and Performance: The Need for Statistics and Data“.
Among the experts that the meeting brought together was PortEconomics member Jean-Paul Rodrigue, who discussed the container traffic port data vs the small data and argues on the need to create to develop a global connectivity index. Jean-Paul initiates the discussion by distiguising big and small data.
Big Data
- Massive quantities
- Usually collected automatically by sensors
- Collected in real time.
- Happens ‘by accident’ as a by-
- product of a digital footprint.
- Ex-post usefulness
Small Data
- Limited quantities
- Collected semi-automatically (often human input)
- Collection delayed by reporting systems (daily, monthly, quarterly, annually)
- Purposefully collected (regulation, reporting, decision making)
- Ex-ante usefulness
You can register and freely download Jean-Paul’s presentation by following the link.
