Econometric Analysis on the Effectiveness across Port State Control Regimes:What are the Areas of Improvement for Inspections?

The lack of trust in the maritime industry has led to a variety of inspections onboard ships that are performed in the name of safety.This article is based on a combined dataset of port state control inspections and casualties for the time period 1999 to 2004 and identifies areas for improvement of port state control inspections.We use binary logistic regression on a dataset which is constructed of twin ships in order to better filter out effects associated with inspection variables such as deficiencies,time in-between inspections,detention or who inspected the vessel while incorporating a summary of ship’s inspection hi story.The model s suggest that there is some 1ack of fol1ow up on recti f- ying deficiencies that have been found during inspections.In addition, the results identify that the main areas of improvement of inspections are within the ISM code(International Safety Management Code) for tankers and general cargo vessels,ship and cargo operations and machinery and propulsion.In addition,the variable indicating detention does not seem to be significant for most models and time in-between inspections only seems to be relevant for serious casualties but not very serious casualties.