A Study on the Economic Performance of the Textile Industry for Korean traditional Clothes

한북직물업체의 생산 및 유통구조에 관한 연구

The purpose of this study was to inves-tigate the economic performance of the textile industry for the Korean traditional clothes. The content of this paper had two pars; The first part was for the macroeconomic aspects such as location production employments and the produc-tion facilities of the textile industries. The second part was for the microeconomic aspects such as business type branding method fabric type R&D efforts sourc-ing and the distributional channel The major results were as follows: 1.) Most textile firms for the korean traditional clothes were located in Gongju for man-made fibers and in Jinju for silk fabrics. 2) The size of the textile industry in terms of the number of business produc-tion amount the number of employee de-creased during 1994 and 1995 due to the decreasing demand. 3) Over the half of the textile firms produced raw fabric products while only 20% of them were involved in additional dyeing and /or printing finish which re-sulted in low value added production 4) The R&D effort of the textile indus-try for the Korean traditional clothes was very low due to the market uncertainty lack of technological knowledge and most of all small size of the firms 5) Most raw materials for the textile in -dustry were imported with high(25%) tariff rates resulting in price increase and thus low competitiveness in the market. 6) The textile producers sole about the 70% of their products to the wholesalers while selling the rest to the retailers di-rectly. This showed the dual structure of the distribution channel in the textile products. These results suggested some implica-tions for the firms the policy makers and the researchers. The firms should develop new and improved products to increase and create consumer demand by intensive R&D efforts. The government policy ma-kers should give financial supports the firms with R&D investment and legal help such as lowing tariff rate for the raw ma-terials. The researchers from the academy could help the textile industry with the advanced technological knowledge and up-date information for the consumer fashion demand.