The survey was made available to all port authorities in the 22 maritime Member States of the European Union and port authorities in four neighbouring countries that are represented in ESPO: Iceland, Norway, Croatia and Israel. The survey was online from 1 April to 15 July 2010. One hundred and sixteen port authorities from the 26 countries represented in ESPO responded. Together, these 116 port authorities reported that they manage a total of 216 different ports. The total freight volume handled by these ports in 2008 amounted to 2 770 803.000 tonnes (Eurostat data completed with national statistics for Iceland and Israel).
Figure 1 illustrates the response rate per country, expressed in percentage of the total volume of cargo handled by all ports in each country.
The bottom line of the figure shows that the total sample of ports that responded to the survey handles 66.2 per cent of the volume of cargo handled