The world merchant fleet continued to grow. The world merchant fleet's tonnage has more than doubled since 2002, reaching 1.60 billion dwt at the start of 2014. Nearly three quarters of this tonnage is flagged out, i.e. the nationality of the vessel's owner was different from the country of registration. A large share of the foreign-flag tonnage is sailing under open registers. Almost half of this foreign-flagged tonnage is registered in only two major open registries, namely Panama (346 million dwt) and Liberia (200 million dwt). The "country of control" information included in the present ISL survey indicates where the controlling interest of a given ship is located, i.e. the home country of the interests behind the primary reference company. As of January 1st, 2014, the country of control information was available for 39,815 merchant ships of 1,000 gt and over with a total deadweight of 1.59 billion dwt, i.e. 99.8 per cent of the total fleet capacity. For 431 ships with 3.0 million dwt this information was unknown.
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