Skill formation in Shipbuilding and Ship Repair: A Comparative Institutional Analysis of Japan, South Korea, China and the European Union, with lessons for India’s maritime ambitions
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.66635/xtkacn32Keywords:
skill formation, shipbuilding, ship repair, vocational education and training, industrial policy, maritime workforce, comparative case study, IndiaAbstract
Purpose: Shipbuilding is a labour intensive, strategically salient industry in which national competitiveness rests to an unusual degree on the depth and renewal of workplace skills. This paper examines how the world’s three dominant shipbuilding economies Japan, South Korea and China together with the European Union’s coordinated response, have organised skill formation in shipbuilding and ship repair, and draws out the implications for India as it pursues the targets of the Maritime India Vision 2030 and the Maritime Amrit Kaal Vision 2047.
Design/methodology/approach: The study adopts a qualitative, comparative case study design (Yin, 2018) triangulating government policy documents, OECD peer reviews, official statistics, industry association data and peer reviewed literature across four cases. Cross case synthesis is organised around five analytical dimensions: government policy evolution; the roles of industry stakeholders and trade unions; institutional infrastructure; flagship programmes; and quantitative workforce indicators.
Findings: The cases reveal three distinct skill formation regimes Japan’s firm led, association coordinated model now supplemented by managed labour migration; South Korea’s state responsive, cyclically adaptive model combining crash training with visa liberalisation; and China’s centrally planned, mass scale mobilisation of vocational education alongside the EU’s multi stakeholder pact for skills as a coordination architecture. No single model transfers wholesale; each, however, offers components directly relevant to India’s emerging ecosystem, in which the ₹69,725 crore shipbuilding package of September 2025 and Andhra Pradesh’s greenfield cluster strategy create an unrepeated policy window.
Originality/value: The paper offers the first integrated comparison of shipbuilding skill formation frameworks across the three Asian incumbents and the EU that is explicitly mapped onto India’s policy architecture and onto a state level implementation case (Andhra Pradesh), contributing to the literatures on collective skill formation, industrial policy and maritime human resource management.
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