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Downfall delayed: Danish shipbuilding and industrial dislocation

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 53; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00076791.2011.574692

1743-7938

René Taudal Poulsen, Henrik Sornn‐Friese,

Coastal and Marine Management

Abstract This article analyses the decline of the Danish shipbuilding industry. European shipyards dominated global shipbuilding markets in the first half of the twentieth century, but began to be challenged by the Japanese from the 1950s and by the South Koreans from the late 1970s. More recently, China has taken over large slices of the global shipbuilding market and currently is the world's largest shipbuilding nation. As a result of this new competition, European shipyards closed en masse and Europe experienced a process of maritime deindustrialisation in the 1970s and 1980s. Danish shipyards were not immune to these challenges, although maritime deindustrialisation in this country was almost two decades later than in many other European countries. This article examines how Denmark was able to escape this general maritime deindustrialisation for so long and offers three explanations: institutional, entrepreneurial and political. Keywords: globalisationindustrial dislocation and declineshipbuilding Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the Danish Maritime Foundation for funding. Thanks go also to Mr Erik Bastiansen, Mr Mogens Schrøder Bech and Professor Kevin Cullinane for constructive comments on earlier drafts of this article, and to Mr Torkil Adsersen for help over the histories of a few of the shipyards in the analysis. Special thanks are due to Mr Søren Lund Hviid from Søfart for making available the order lists from 2004 and 2007. Finally, the authors are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments. Notes 1. On the decline of British shipbuilding see Stråth (1987), Lorenz (1991), Todd (1991), Burton (1994), Johnman and Murphy (1998, 2002, 2005), and Jamieson (2003). On the decline of the British economy see Elbaum and Lazonick (1986) and Broadberry (2004). 2. Maritime economist Martin Stopford (2009) shows the structural shift in global shipbuilding based on the number of ships built around the world. However, number of ships does not take account of differences in vessel size and the workload involved in building these ships. Generally, the outfitting of advanced vessels (e.g. container ships, gas carriers, specialty vessels and passenger cruisers) is more labour-intensive than the construction of oil tankers and bulk carriers. Also, large ships require more man-hours of work than smaller ships. Therefore, tonnage is a more reliable measure of workload. Gross tonnage (GT) is a cubic measure of the total enclosed space in a ship, expressed in tons: a ton is equivalent to 100 cubic feet. Compensated Gross Tonage (CGT) is an even better measure of workload (Wijnolst & Wergeland 1997). It is based on the vessel's tonnage and takes account of the work content of different vessels, weighting, e.g. passenger ships higher than oil tankers. 3. Merchant oil tankers carry a wide range of hydrocarbons, from crude oil to refined petroleum products. Crude carriers are among the largest oil tankers, ranging from around 55,000 tdw (tons deadweight) to over 550,000 tdw. The VLCC (200,000–320,000 tdw) and the ULCC (320,000–550,000 tdw) are popularly referred to as 'supertankers'. 4. See Tenold (2001, 2006) on the global shipping crisis and Jeppesen et al. (2001) on Denmark. 5. Ships delivered from the North Sea Yard, Aarhus Dockyard, B&W and the Nakskov and Elsinore shipyards are listed in Mikkelsen (2004), Simonsen et al. (1995), Eriksen (1993, p. 141–160), Koch (2005, pp. 201–204), and Jørgensen (2003, pp. 71–97). For the list of ships delivered by the Aalborg yard, see Aalborg Stadsarkiv, archives of Aalborg yard: New-build list, A 36, Æ 107, lb. No. 5.