建国初期東ドイツ造船業の技術状況と国際競争力

Abstract

It is generally accepted that the technological level of the former planned economies was lower than that of market economies. Technologies differ, however, from industry to industry and develop over time. Therefore, it is necessary to study the technologies of each industry separately. This paper focuses on the shipbuilding industry of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the first half of the 1950s and thus examines the technological level of the most rapidly growing industry of the GDR during the period 1945 to 1955.In terms of product quality, the GDR's shipbuilding industry was capable of building ships that had as high a capacity as ships built in West Germany. But not all the ships had such high capacities; only some did.The research and development obtained, on the one hand, had good results because of the engineers concentrated in the central bureau of R&D. On the other hand, there were many problems : difficulty with the technology imported from western countries, delayed completion, and poor quality of structural designs, etc.In the early 1950s new technologies-structural welding and section building-were introduced to the GDR's shipyards by other shipbuilding countries. These innovations modified the shipbuilding industry into a line-production system for the first time. But the shortage of skilled workers, defects in production planning, delays in delivery of supplies, inferior quality of materials, and unstable electric power supplies, all of which were part of a day's work in planned economies, caused ineffective use of these new technologies.Because of these problems, the productivity of the GDR's shipbuilding industry ranged between one-third and one-tenth of those of the top-rank shipbuilding countries in 1953. As a result, the GDR's shipbuilding industry did not have sufficient international competitiveness.