2. Overview and performance of the EU logistics sector
2.1 Introduction
Logistics systems are enablers of a work-sharing economy, with high interactions between the countries of Europe, and are therefore highly complex. The whole European logistics market size (including the EU28 countries) amounted to about € 878 bn in 20125. However, although the availability of statistics and other sources has increased in the last couple of years, there still exists a lack of systematic and consistent data in the field of transport and logistics – especially at a pan-European level.
In this study, logistics is considered as a set of services including the planning, organisation, management, execution and monitoring of a company’s entire material, goods and information flows (from purchasing, production and warehousing, to added value services, distribution and reverse logistics).
To provide an adequate statistical basis for a mid- and long-term policy strategy for the EU logistic sector, the study analyses and evaluates the available logistics data in the EU and identifies gaps, as well as solutions, for the logistics data collection.
In this chapter a number of analytical steps have been carried out:
Analysis of existing studies and reports in the field of logistical data;
Review and evaluation of retrievable and available public and commercial statistics;
Identification of gaps in quantity, quality and detail of those sources;
Application of existing or development of new methods to close the data gaps;
Documentation of sources, update processes and methods on country and aggregated European level.
The focus of the statistical basis is to provide as much quantified data from public, reliable sources as possible. The figures should cover all EU28 countries and represent a time series from 2005 to 2012. In the events that there is a dearth of sources or reasonable doubts about the quality, expert judgements will be used to close these gaps. In this case, the affected data is marked as estimated and methods of statistical methodology will be explained.
The next figure shows all four sub-task of task 1.