Maritime Flags of Convenience Visualized

We recently 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.

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

Of note, the data is from the May 15th 2007 version of the CIA World Factbook.
Total number of ships registered worldwide in 2007: 33,222
Total number of foreign owned ships in 2007: 16,717.