Effect of shipping aid policies on the competitive advantage of national flagged fleets: Comparison of Taiwan, Korea and Japan

• To perform a comparative analysis of the competitive advantages of the national flagged fleets.
• To explore the effect of shipping aid policies on a national-flag fleet׳s competitive advantage.
• Aggressive shipping aid policy will make a good performance than passive shipping aid policy.

The purpose of this paper is to perform a comparative analysis of the competitive advantages of the national fleets of Taiwan, Korea, and Japan, and explore the effect of shipping aid policies on a national fleet׳s competitive advantage, employing gray relational analysis (GRA). We found that the factors best able to assess the competitive advantage of a national merchant fleet include number of vessels, gross tonnage and deadweight tonnage of the fleet, number of seamen, and cargo volume transported by the fleet. We further discovered that Korean national merchant fleet has the greatest competitive advantage, followed by the fleets of Taiwan and Japan in that order, and found that aggressive shipping aid policies are a more effective way to ensure good performance than passive shipping aid policies.