Maritime Flags of Convenience Visualized

By John Konrad On October 18, 2007

With the recent LNG News I decided to get to work on some maritime visualizations. Above is a bubble graph I created representing the number of ships registered to each flag state.

CLICK FOR INTERACTIVE VISUALIZATION

This graph is even more interesting, it shows the number of ships registered to each country by foreign owners. Notice the Flags of Convenience? Surprising that the U.S. has 51 flagged ships registered by foreigners.

Data is from the May 15th 2007 version of the CIA World Factbook.
Total number of ships registered worldwide: 33,222
Total number of foreign owned ships: 16,717.
More graphs of this data:

Merchant Marine – Rank Order (top chart):

Ships owned by foreigners worldwide:

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About The Author

John Konrad

Captain John Konrad is co-founder of Unofficial Networks, Editor In Chief of this blog and author of the book Fire On The Horizon. He is a USCG licensed Master Mariner of Unlimited Tonnage and, since graduating from SUNY Maritime College, has sailed a variety of ships from ports around the world. John currently lives in Morro Bay, California with his wife and two children.