• Informatization Policy
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.89-110
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• 2014

As a travel demand management and environmental policy, the government actively promotes alternative work arrangements such as telecommuting. Against this backdrop, several empirical studies, which aim to verify the benefits of telecommuting, have been recently conducted. Little consensus, however, exists with respect to the defining, measuring, and forecasting telecommuting, although these are fundamental basis of policy evaluation and academic research. As a fundamental research for analyzing telecommuting impacts, this paper reviews various definitions regarding telecommuting, examines telecommuting penetration and level of telecommuting through review of available survey data in Korea, and forecasts future penetration. The result suggests that current home-based telecommuting penetration and level of telecommuting is approximately 0.5 to 1.1% and 0.2 to 0.5%, respectively, and is approximately 0.2% and 0.1%, respectively, for the center-based telecommuting. In addition, shift-share analysis shows that home-based telecommuting penetration in the Seoul Metropolitan Area in 2020 will be 1.3%, not much different with the current value. Consequently, current telecommuting penetration is much lower than the value that is fed to us by the media (10~20%), and the future prospect is also much lower than the goal of government (30~45%); thus, we can conclude that government's goal of telecommuting promotion is difficult to meet if active encouragement policy will not be introduced.