On the battle between shipbuilding regions in Germany and South Korea (30)

Theme Track: Regional and Urban Planning - Regional Governance

Author:
Hassink, Robert

Although South Korea is the world's number one shipbuilding nation, its yards are forced to restructure into higher value-added segments of the shipbuilding industry due to the declining world market and increasing competition from low-wage neighbouring countries, such as China. In Germany, shipbuilding has been a declining and restructuring industry since the 1970s. Due to supposedly illegal state support for South Korea's shipyards, a trade conflict has been going on between the European Commission and South Korea's government. Of the very few modern theoretical concepts in economic geography that try to explain the decline of old industrial areas, such as shipbuilding regions, evolutionary regional economics, in general, and the political lock-in concept (Grabher 1993), in particular, are promising ones. Political lock-ins can be considered as thick regional institutional tissues aiming at preserving existing traditional industrial structures and therefore indirectly hampering the development of indigenous potential and creativity. Since the groundwork of this concept rests on experiences in one region (the Ruhr Area in Germany) and one kind of traditional industrial complex (steel and coal-mining), it is due to be systematically tested in a broader industrial and geographical context. This paper therefore aims at empirically analysing this concept of political lock-ins in two competing shipbuilding regions, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in Germany and Gyeongnam in South Korea. The paper shows that political lock-ins in shipbuilding are to a very small extent regional phenomena. They rather emerge at the national and international institutional level, which regulate the conditions of competition to an increasing extent.

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