The reason for ineffective policy making is due the asymmetric information and under reporting. More variables regarding accident have to be identified and be reported for each accident. Since the accident events were taking place in sea, the company doesnt have much control over the events. And the ships crew have incentive towards under reporting of the accidents. This is due to fact that the captain/ crew want to protect their reputation and also to avoid some complicated investigation or procedure from external organization.
So there is a sense of asymmetric information and under reporting is involved in shipping industry. This should be solved by policy makers by creating the mandatory common database platform for all shipping companies and access to all of them by policy makers. Also collecting more data regarding the accidents will give better results on studies regarding accidents. Many academic literature clearly indicates that asymmetric information and under reporting of the accidents are also one of the constraints in efficient policy making. The variables such as crew nationality, average age of the crew, average experience of the seafarer, weather information like sea state, temperature, visibility etc., and location of the ship, load conditions and other variables should be added and experimented. The information from electronic chart should be seamlessly connected instead of manual feeding of information from human beings. There is also no standardized reporting format for shipping accidents. Each shipping company has their own reporting format and procedures. Many accident database were unstructured and never analyses before. Under-reporting of maritime accident is a problem for authorities to improve safety culture and also for companies to make analysis. On average, the number of underreported accidents makes up roughly 50% of all accidents. The analysis should be made considering that there will be a underreporting of accidents. Finally sustainable safety culture can be developed by continuous study and research in the field of safety.
Deepak sekar 