Watching Trade from Space: Measuring Maritime Trade Using Satellite Imagery

Yonggeun Jung

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: This paper combines synthetic aperture radar imagery, nighttime lights, and port characteristics to measure port-level maritime trade using only publicly available data. We evaluate the framework at ports the model has never observed, training on United States ports and testing on European ports and then reversing the exercise, and find that the mapping transfers in both directions. Applying the framework to Russian ports after the 2022 sanctions, we find reallocation, with the Far East the only basin rising faster than the movement common to all Russian ports. The approach complements methods based on the Automatic Identification System: where transponders broadcast, AIS-based estimates track official statistics closely, and after the sanctions the radar keeps recording activity at western Russian ports that disappears from the AIS record, which is where dark shipping concentrates.

Date: 2026-04, Revised 2026-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-cis, nep-for, nep-geo, nep-int and nep-tre
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.15444 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2604.15444

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().