Resumen de Government policy and the rise of a national shipping industry: Korea’s experience, 1967–1999
In 2017, Koreans controlled 1,656 vessels with an aggregate tonnage of 80,976,874 deadweight (dwt), placing Korea as the world’s seventh largest shipowning country. Given that Korean-owned tonnage stood at just 1.3m dwt in 1970, this represented a remarkable rate of growth over less than half a century. This article focuses on the years from 1967 to 1999 and aims to prove that government policy was one of the key causal factors in the rapid increase in Korean shipping. The paper is organised into four main parts. In the first section, the role of the government in the development of the economy is assessed, while Section 2 focuses on state policies designed to promote the shipping industry in Korea. Section 3 highlights the rise of Korean shipping from 1967 to 1999, and the final part considers the wider implications of the role of government policy in the development of the shipping industry.
