Globalisation and Deregulation of the Maritime Industry — a General Review

The end of the Second World War was followed by what is now widely looked back upon in the advanced industrial societies as a golden age of growth. The coming to an end of this period, for many people clearly marked by OPEC’s decision to quadruple the price of oil in 1973, has been attributed to a variety of different causes, including not least a rise in wages as a consequence of the strengthening of labour, which had been brought about on the back of full employment and an increased sense of security engendered by the post-war welfare state. As Armstrong et al. (1991: 172) put it: ‘In full employment lay both the historic achievement of the boom and its undoing.’ The difficulties raised by full employment manifested themselves most obviously in accelerating inflation. A less noticeable but ultimately more crucial problem was a general decline in profitability. As long as the boom had continued, it had been accompanied by a rise in the mass production — and mass consumption — of durable goods. In the advanced capitalist countries GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and GDP per capita grew almost twice as fast as in any previous period since 1820. The growth in the volume of trade was eight times faster in 1950–73 than in the period 1913–50 and twice as great as in the century from 1820. World trade in manufactured goods grew eight-fold (Glyn et al. 1990: 42).