• Journal of the Korean Regional Science Association
• /
• v.33 no.3
• /
• pp.61-78
• /
• 2017

Among several policies for industrial decentralization introduced since the 1960s, business relocation grant policies put a heavy financial burden on central and local governments. This study investigates the change in the likelihood of manufacturing establishments' relocation to the non-SMA associate with the change in business relocation grant policies. Using the mining and manufacturing survey data from 1996 to 2014, manufacturing firms' relocation decision model in nested logit structure was estimated. The data showed that the proportion of movements from the SMA to the non-SMA significantly increased after the introduction of the grant policies. However, estimation results of firms' relocation decision model indicated that the likelihood of firms relocating from the SMA to the non-SMA decreased after the introduction of the grant policies. In particular, firms' likelihood to move into the rural regions is even lower in the period of the grant extension. This suggests that increasing rate of relocations toward the rural regions may have been driven by the growing advantage of rural locations, such as low land rent and improvement in market accessibility, rather than the grants per se. This implies that the alleviation of physical and environmental constraints of the rural regions and the creation of business friendly environment such as easy access to premises at reasonable prices and strengthened linkage with the SMA, rather than simple provision of business relocation grants, needed to attract businesses in the rural regions.