Flags of Convenience

As a follow-up to the last post on Liberia and their disproportionately huge shipping fleet, I did a bit more digging on the subject of ship registration, and found some interesting things.

A ship registered in a country expressly for the purpose of taking advantage of weak or non-existent taxes, labour standards, etc. is said to be flying under a "flag of convenience". If Wikipedia is to be trusted, half of the world's shipping vessels are registered under these flags.

There are ships registered in just about every country you could think of, including 61 ships which sail under the flag of Mongolia (total shoreline: zero kilometres).


Fig. 1: A maritime paradise.

Now, you may be concerned that you're registering your ship with a country with no naval presence whatsoever, but that fear would be totally unfounded. Mongolia does indeed have a navy, which consists of (no joke) seven guys and a tugboat, which was hauled across the desert in pieces and assembled to patrol Mongolia's largest body of water, Lake Hovsgol... you know, just in case a neighbouring country decides to haul their own navy across the desert in pieces, and then assemble it, and then launch an attack on the other side of the lake.