1950年代後半〜60年代前半における日本造船業の建造効率と国際競争 : 建造実績世界一と西欧水準建造効率達成の幻影
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概要
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This paper analyzes the international competitiveness of the Japanese shipbuilding industry from the end of the 1950s to the early 1960s. The predominant view is that Japanese shipbuilders steadily improved their building efficiency after the Second World War and eventually obtained the largest share of the world market by garnering a good reputation for strict observance of delivery time. Indeed, since 1956, Japan had ranked first in terms of the total gross tonnage of merchant vessels launched in the world, and held this position until 1999. However, many previous studies have assumed, without sufficient evidence, that Japanese shipbuilders and other shipbuilders competed to obtain orders in the same market. Moreover, it is doubtful that labour efficiency in the shipbuilding industry in Japan was much higher than in the Western European countries in the 1950s and the early 1960s. This means that we need to look for factors other than labour efficiency to explain how Japanese firms succeeded in obtaining orders. This article challenges the common supposition. In fact, Japanese shipbuilders received foreign orders from emerging Greece owners and the Western European shipbuilders got orders from the U.K. and Norway. The evidence demonstrates that Japanese and Western European shipbuilders' markets were generally unrelated_they each had different sets of customers during this period. Previous studies have also asserted that Japanese shipbuilding grew because it was far superior to that of Western European countries in its ability to expand oil tanker capacity. However, such a conclusion disregards the practices of the shipbuilding industry: large vessels were built along specifications required by customers rather than simply built by shipbuilders on the anticipation of an order. There has been little discussion of the possibility that Western European shipbuilders did not need to expand the capacity of their oil tankers simply because the specifications from their customers did not request this. Little attention has been paid to the relationship between tanker size and the actual navigation routes used. The data indicates that Japanese domestic shipowners were the only customers in the world that required constant expansion in their oil tanker sizes due to the fact that they did not navigate the Suez Canal. By examining these points, this article provides new explanations for the growth of the Japanese shipbuilding industry from the end of 1950s to the early 1960s that more accurately reflect the specific characteristics of the shipbuilding industry and the available empirical data.
- 2008-10-30
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