The lowest supply and demand of deck officers of national vessels in Taiwan

Abstract

The shipping industry is essential to the island country of Taiwan, which makes the issue of how many national vessels and deck officers the country needs very important. This paper is based on the number of Taiwanese deck officers from 1994 to 2000 and adopts a six-year moving average to work out the transition probability of deck officers. The moving average is also used to construct an absorbing Markov Transition Matrix to forecast the terms of seniority and annual supply in each hierarchy. The quantity of demand for imported consumer goods from 1994 to 2000 in Taiwan is employed in order to estimate the minimum number of vessels needed. A Grey model is applied to predict the annual quantity of demand for imported consumer goods. This article also estimated the minimum number of demand for deck officers according to the minimum number of vessels needed. In addition, this paper used cross-analysis to investigate the manpower supply and demand of deck officers in Taiwan. Results suggest that the demand of national vessels far surpasses the supply and that the imbalance phenomenon is worsening each year. The deck officer supply is found to surpass demand. These results have implications for both labor and national vessel development policies.