PECULIARITIES OF CURRENT WORLD SCIENTIFIC RESEARCHES ON MARITIME ECONOMICS AND SPECIFICALLY SEABORNE TRADE

Abstract

The article analyzes and systemizes current studies of leading world scientists on maritime economics and seaborne trade with the aim to reveal current trends and venues for future researches in this field. Special attention is paid to researches evaluating how the outbreak of coronavirus pandemic impacted shipping industry as a main global supplier of goods. All studies under review are conceptually grouped into two main branches. The first branch comprises papers focused on the world seaborne trade data dynamics, including official maritime reports. As opposed to Ukrainian and Russian maritime economics papers which predominantly describe and portray the statistical data available in official maritime reports issued by international organizations and shipping services providers, leading world scholars use this statistics as a baseline for individualized researches, mainly focused on investigation of correlation between various shipping indicators and prediction of same. The second branch comprises papers investigating trade of certain types of cargo, such as containers, crude oil, dry bulk. Several general peculiarities of both branches of researches are defined. Almost all of them attempt to provide an insight into the nature of a freight rate and to forecast the development of either general freight market or specific cargo related one. The utilized methodology is also identical. Depending on the aim of research and data availability, scholars employ various models of regression analysis, a standard tool of statistical modeling, which estimates the average relationship between two or more variables. No matter which freight market is under investigation, studies usually try to examine the connection of this market with others by evaluating the spillover effects between vessel types and vessel sizes. Distinguishing features of researches lie in the target stakeholders who could benefit from, either the industry in general or particular groups of market participants. In addition, nowcasting trade data is a real problem raised by the industry to modern science, which tries to tackle it by proposing innovative digitalized solutions.

Keywords

• maritime economics
• seaborne trade
• nowcasting trade data
• international maritime transportation
• merchant fleet
• shipping companies
• freight market
• freight rate
• dry bulk transportation
• coronavirus pandemic