Research and Forecasting the Development of Container Traffic in the Baltic Sea Region

Nowadays it is complicated to imagine international trade without shipping, it makes a total about 90 percent of foreign trade. The introduction of containerization in the 60s greatly led to a growth of global economy. The success of container shipping can be explained by two reasons: it improved a productivity by reducing processing time and created more consistent process which improved shipping lines. With the existence of routes between large ports with huge amount of cargo in mega-containerships, there is a need to improve short-sea routes. Therefore, numerous feeder companies were created to distribute goods by medium-sized containerships to small ports. After numerous political changes in the Baltic Sea Region (the BSR), this region is finally completing its full European integration. However, problems with logistics still have a place to be. In 2014, the total amount of cargo handled in the entire Baltic region amounted to 8.4% of the global volume. Although in Europe road transport is very popular, it is usually accompanied by short-sea transport. The last mentioned can be divided into two segments: the so-called “roll on, roll of” (RORO), when a loaded vehicle is placed onto a ship, and feeder lines which connect transshipment nodes to small ports by using smaller ships. This creates a large, complex port system. This paper will focus on the maritime container flows in the Baltic Sea Region. The following tasks were assigned to achieve the goal:  To explore global trends in the development of shipping;  To identify the features of shipping in the Baltic region;  To collect statistics of container companies;  To define types of route transportation;  To study methods for forecasting the number of container vessels.