Seatrade Maritime is part of the Informa Markets Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

New report stresses economic importance of EU shipping

New report stresses economic importance of EU shipping
European owned or controlled tonnage today represents about 40% of the world fleet - including 60% of containerships and 37% of offshore vessels in gt terms – and is a key contributor to the region’s economy, according to a new report commissioned by the European Community Shipowners’ Associations (ECSA), which represents the shipowner bodies of the EU and Norway.

The 70-page report, “The economic value of the EU shipping industry”, carried out by consultants Oxford Economics, shows that EU shipping is estimated to have directly contributed EUR56bn ($77bn) to GDP, employed 590,000 people and generated tax revenues of EUR6bn in 2012. Adding in indirect (or supply chain) support and induced impacts, these figures rise to EUR145bn, 2.3m and EUR41bn respectively.

For comparison purposes, this makes shipping a larger contributor to the EU economy than the aviation industry, points out the report.

And it estimates that these economic benefits would have been “reduced by 50%” without the various national tonnage tax schemes that have been introduced and permitted under the EU State Aid Guidelines for shipping, producing a number of detailed national case studies to back up its point.

By country, the largest gross value added contributors to GDP were Germany and Norway, together accounting for 39% of the total, followed by the UK. As a percentage of national GDP, shipping came out top in Norway (6.8%), Greece (6.4%) and Denmark (5.6%).

The presence was unveiled at a conference organized by ECSA in Brussels yesterday, in the presence of EU Commissioner for Transport Siim Kallas. Given the forthcoming European Parliament elections in late May that will lead to formation of a new European Commission in November, the event provided ECSA with the opportunity to air its “sort of pre-election manifesto,” said ECSA secretary general Patrick Verhoeven.

The ceos of three leading EU shipowning companies had been invited to give presentations suggesting ways of improving the competitiveness of the EU shipping industry.

Philippe Louis-Dreyfus of France’s Louis Dreyfus Armateurs spoke on the need to maintain an attractive business climate, including “a stable and homogenous Legal/Tax network and confirmed State Aide Guidelines”.

Niels Smedegaard of Denmark’s DFDS emphasized that EU policies on sustainable shipping also had to be economically viable, providing a detailed study of the cost to his company, and its freight customers, of the need to comply with the EU Sulphur Directive, which he described as an “own goal” by regulators as it would force some shippers to use less environmentally friendly road transport instead purely for cost reasons. He called for earlier and closer dialogue between regulators, authorities and the shipping industry to prevent such mistakes occurring in the future.

And David Dingle of Carnival UK provided an impassioned plea for the need to enlarge the EU seafarer pool by enhanced maritime training and less restrictive EU employment law, which he called “a disincentive to flag in Europe.”