Market share at 0.1%, Trump wants to make US shipbuilding great again. Too little, too late?
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Synopsis
Once a world leader, the US shipbuilding industry is far behind China, Japan, and Korea. While it costs roughly twice as much to build a ship in the US, protectionist measures stifling competition have done more harm than good to American shipbuilders. Can the Trump administration help them make a comeback?
During World War II, the United States was the world’s largest shipbuilder. But in the decades following the war, it saw a steep decline. Even though the world’s largest economy annually imports over USD4 trillion worth of goods, ships built outside the US account for 40% of the delivery. That’s because commercial shipbuilding in the US today is virtually zero. In fact, the share of the US in global shipbuilding has fallen to a puny 0.1%. In the