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The European Council Directive 95/64/EC of 8 December 1995 establishes a harmonised framework for the collection of maritime statistics across the European Union. It defines the information to be periodically transmitted from each Member State to Eurostat, for the carriage of goods and passengers by sea. All Member States are concerned (Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, the UK) but Austria and Luxembourg which do not have sea traffic.

EDIMARS (EDI for Maritime Statistics) started early 1995 with Spain, France and the Netherlands, and involves also now Germany, the UK and Ireland. It is a project that facilitates the exchange of experience in the organisation and implementation of maritime statistics data collection. It helps reduce the cost and improve the efficiency of collecting and disseminating maritime transport statistics, through the use Electronic Data Interchange (EDI).

The EDIMARS project demonstrated through real trials in some Member States that the use of EDI for collecting maritime statistics brings two major advantages :

• an homogeneous language for transmitting the data sets required by the Directive using GESMES for maritime transport statistics;
• there are ways of automatically extracting the statistical data from operational EDIFACT messages such as IFCSUM (International Forwarding and Consolidation Summary Message) or CUSCAR (Customs Cargo Report), as well as from Port Community Systems or Information Systems.

For more information, brochures of the 1995 and 1996 projects are available in the Library.