How we build Logistics Activity

The data come from Eurostat’s services production index (dataset sts_sepr_m, short-term business statistics), a monthly series published with a lag of about two months (latest available period: June 2026). We keep a copy in our data warehouse and the website never queries Eurostat live. Reuse is permitted with attribution: “Source: Eurostat (sts_sepr_m). Calculations: EED Data”.

The index tracks the volume of output of service activities, net of price changes: a reading of the sector’s real economic activity. It is not tonnes, traffic, nominal turnover or employment. The current base is 2021 = 100: a value of 120 means 20% more output than the 2021 average — not 20% growth over the past year. We show the calendar and seasonally adjusted series (SCA), the right one for comparing consecutive months.

• Transportation and storage (NACE H): the sector aggregate, our headline figure.
• Land transport and transport via pipelines (H49): includes road, rail and pipelines — it is not just trucking.
• Water transport (H50): the whole of NACE division 50 (sea and inland waterways). It is not the same as maritime port traffic: that signal is in the Maritime Radar and in PortStats.
• Air transport (H51) and warehousing and support activities for transportation (H52) — the latter is the best proxy for the activity of logistics nodes.

Eurostat revises recent months: every run reimports the full series and, if an already published value changes, the previous one is archived — we never overwrite silently. Countries are sorted and compared by change, never by index level: national structures make levels non-comparable across countries. When a level appears next to a country it is an internal reading — how far it is from its own 2021 average —, not a position relative to the others. This section’s role in the ecosystem is context: it provides the economic backdrop to the physical signals of the Maritime Radar and to the flows in Trade and Transport, always as independent indicators.