Where, when and why shipping gets attacked.
Piracy is a tail risk for global shipping lanes. The raw counts are well known; what is less clear is how seasonality shifted over three decades, and which country-level indicators actually move with attack frequency.
How it works
Annotated turning points. Yearly counts showing the Somali piracy boom, its collapse after international naval patrols ramped up in 2011–2012, and the later rise of Gulf of Guinea piracy.
Seasonality done properly. An STL decomposition instead of a classical one, which by construction repeats an identical 12-month pattern and hides how seasonality actually shifted.
Claims that survive testing. Significance tests on correlation and seasonality claims, plus a multi-country correlation table with p-values.
Fixing a biased average. The per-country “attacks per year” average originally excluded zero-attack years from the denominator, inflating bursty countries; it now averages over the full period.
Under the hood
References
- Sources: International Maritime Bureau, World Bank, FRED.