Abstract

"The New Phase of Asian Shipbuilding (1970–2005): Market Structures and the Diverging Paths of Japan and South Korea"

Sungshin Cho, Doshisha University (cho.sungshin.815@gmail.com)

Understanding East Asia’s postwar economic growth requires attention not only to land-based industries but also to maritime sectors that sustained trade and industrialization. Among them, shipbuilding—an export-driven and labor-intensive industry—provided both vital foreign currency earnings and large-scale employment during the early stages of growth. By the 2020s, East Asia accounted for nearly 95 percent of global new vessel production, firmly establishing the region as the center of the world’s shipbuilding economy.
Most previous studies have focused on the shift of shipbuilding leadership from Europe to Asia, treating it as a linear relocation driven by cost and policy advantages. This study asks why Japan and South Korea—two major shipbuilding nations sharing similar technologies and facing the same global market—followed different paths after the mid-1990s.
Drawing on comparative quantitative and qualitative data from 1970 to 2005—including shipbuilding output by vessel type, government documents on industrial and maritime policy, industry association reports, and data from Lloyd’s Register—the paper analyzes Japan and South Korea to identify when and how their trajectories diverged. The divergence became evident after 1995. Japan’s shipbuilders, supported by a robust domestic coastal shipping market and decentralized industrial organization, remained focused on medium-sized, domestically oriented vessels. South Korean firms, by contrast, operated under a centralized structure that fostered export specialization in high-value, large-scale ships such as LNG carriers and container vessels.
This comparison reveals that industrial divergence in East Asian shipbuilding stemmed not only from state policy or technology, but from deeper structural differences in maritime demand and organizational coordination. The findings highlight the role of export-led industries in shaping Asia’s economic growth and offer broader implications for understanding industrial differentiation, path dependence, and regional transformation in the postwar global economy.