• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.5-18
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• 2017

Total debt in the People's Republic of China surged to nearly 290% as a ratio to GDP by the second quarter of 2016, mostly on account of non-financial corporate debt. The outpouring of credit to stem the impact of the global financial crisis accentuated industrial overcapacity in traditional sectors, such as steel, cement, and energy, while feeding asset bubbles in the property, equity and bond markets. At the Chinese corporate level, this has translated into weakened fundamentals and a fall in industrial profits, particularly of SOEs. As debtors struggle to service interest payments, non-performing loans (NPLs) have been on the rise. This paper assesses the financial fragility of the Chinese economy by looking at risk factors in the non-financial sector. We apply quantile regressions to a dataset containing all Chinese listed companies in Standard & Poor's IQ Capital database. We find higher sensitivity over time of corporate leverage to some of its key determinants, particularly for firms at the upper margin of the distribution. In particular, profitability increasingly acts as a curb on corporate leverage. At a time of falling profitability across the Chinese non-financial corporate sector, this eases the brake on leverage and may contribute to its continuing increase.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.155-194
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• 2009

The Korean economy successfully overcame the macroeconomic downturns driven from the Asian financial crisis in a very short period of time. The economic shock, however, generated a variety of social problems, one of which was the increase in felonies (homicides, robbery, rape, and arson), or degradation of public safety. We argue that the Korean criminal policy has not been effective to ameliorate the rising trends in crime caused by the financial crisis. In order to substantiate this claim, we assess the effectiveness of criminal policy: policing, sentencing, and corrections. First, there has been resource shortage in policing since the 1997 financial crisis. For the past ten years, the investment of human resource and budget in the police has been virtually stagnant, as well as in prosecutors' investigation activities. The insufficient resource allocation in policing caused a huge decline in arrest rates and prosecution rates. Second, the Korean judicial system has not increased the severity of punishment. Comparing the pre- and the post-financial crisis period, the average length of prison sentence by the courts has declined. Given the degrading in the quality of crime and the decreasing amount of inputs into the policing and prosecution, the government should have increased the severity of punishment to deter crime. Third, we found that the government hired more officers and allocated larger budget into prison and probation. However, it is difficult to suggest that the increased level of resources in correctional programs have been effective in preventing released prisoners from committing future crimes. This is because the number of repeat offenders convicted of more than a third offense increased dramatically since 1997, pushing felonies upward. In sum, the government organizations failed to respond respectively or to make coordinated actions, eventually causing a dramatic increase in crimes. This research brings explicit policy implications. In order to prevent possible additional degradation of public safety, the government must put more efforts into increasing the effectiveness of policy and to investing more resources into said policies. We also emphasize the importance of the institutional mechanisms which foster policy coordination among the Police, the Prosecutor's Office, the Ministry of Justice, and other relevant government organizations.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.8 no.12
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• pp.39-50
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• 2021

We investigate competition and its impact on borrowers' indebtedness (BI) in South Asian microfinance. Our empirical investigations are based on a comprehensive panel dataset of 355 MFIs located in seven countries in South Asia. The empirical results revealed that microfinance in South Asia is imperfectly competitive and the existing industry shows a monopolistic competition during the period under consideration. Also, the competition increased after the global financial crisis (GFC) in 2007-08 which implies that microfinance uses hostile lending behavior through the adverse selection that is highly risky and it can induce repayment crisis. The empirical findings also show that increased competition has significant negative effects on borrowers' indebtedness, particularly in large-scale and regulated microfinance organizations (MFIs). Instead of using equity financing, debt financing could be a better option. Finally, we find that while competition seems to have some positive effects in economic discourse by channeling technological improvements in products and services, its negative effects in microfinance outweigh the benefits over costs, particularly in poverty-stricken nations. The findings are helpful for the policymakers, microfinance industry, investors, borrowers, and Central Bank of South Asian markets.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.699-711
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• 2011

This study is to perform several major analyses to find any differences in the leverage between the pre- and post-period of the currency crisis. Moreover, another aspect is to investigate a financial aspect which has received relatively little attention to the firms and/or industries in the emerging capital markets in comparison to those in the advanced markets. The purpose of this empirical study is to confirm whether or not, it is myth or reality that Korean business conglomerate, chaebol, firms with subsidized financing from government-owned domestic financial institutions in the pre-financial turmoil, may still maintain their higher leverage, even after the crisis. It was found that firms belonging to the chaebol in Korea maintained higher average book-value and market-value based debt ratios, relative to their counterparts not belonging to the chaebol across all of the tested models. There were positive relationships of IND3(=the chemical industry) and Ind5(=the construction industry) to the book-value leverage. This study identified that there were no differences in the explanatory variables included, between the tested models (that is, without and with including the present value of an operating lease) related to each debt ratio. Since the Korean government continue to improve the corporate governance of the domestic firms in terms of accounting transparency and corporate ownership, it would be more efficient, if utilizing this "new" ratio considering an operating lease as an effective measurement of the level of leverage. In terms of the capital structure, it may also be possible for foreign firms to utilize and benefit from the results obtained in this study when operating their new businesses in Korea, given the economic circumstances such as the ongoing progress of the Korea-America FTA or the Korea-China FTA.

• East Asian Economic Review
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.3-23
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• 2012

The recent global financial crisis has highlighted the importance of international monetary and financial system reform. The current system is deemed to be no longer adequate to meet the needs of a complex, integrated world economy. With regards to the reform of the international monetary system, there have been various proposals both in demand and supply sides. These include proposals to build a stronger global financial safety net, to diversify the supply of international reserve currency and so on. These proposals face trade-offs between desirability and political feasibility. Given this situation, a practical transition would be to strengthen policy coordination among the major economies and to reform the International Monetary Fund. The success on both fronts depends heavily on global economic governance reform and the role of the G20. Increased status and representation of Asian countries in the G20 give both privileges and responsibilities to Asians. To meet these responsibilities, Asians should put forth greater efforts to develop their intellectual leadership in global economic issues through creating new forum and institutions.

• Asian Journal of Innovation and Policy
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.268-276
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• 2023

As the climate crisis intensifies, the need to improve the climate resilience of developing countries is ever increasing. Hence, the international community is seeking ways to effectively conduct climate technology transfer by linking the projects with financial mechanisms. However, commercialization of climate technology in developing countries is no easy feat as comprehensive knowledge on the target country is a prerequisite for seeking a suitable technology-financial linkage measure. Hence, in-depth discussions on effective climate technology and financial linkage measures have become an important global agenda, and South Korea, as a country with long experience in climate technology transfer, and a strong ecosystem for public climate technology, should step forward to take up a leading role. Against this backdrop, this paper proposes strategies and implementation measures for linking funds from the Multilateral Development Banks (MDB) with Korea's Public Climate Technology (PCT) by examining several key areas of R&D, international cooperation, and technology commercialization.

• East Asian Economic Review
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.245-273
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• 2024

This paper sets up a small open new Keynesian economy model with constrained households and incomplete markets to address the driving forces of business cycles in Korea. It shows that there exists a substantial fraction of constrained households who cannot have access to financial market. Furthermore, the estimated model reveals that a TANK model is better than a RANK model in explaining business cycles in Korea. The effect of domestic productivity shock on Korean economy has dominated in the variations of output, while the contribution of the foreign productivity shock to the variations of output and inflation has increased after the Asian financial crisis. The monetary policy shock has dominated the variation of inflation at short and medium horizons.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.171-179
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• 2021

In the international markets, financial variables can be volatile and may affect each other, especially in the crisis times. COVID-19, which began in China in 2019 and spread to many countries of the world, created a crisis not only in the global health system but also in the international financial markets and economy. The purpose of this study is to analyze the contagious effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the volatility of selected financial variables such as Bitcoin, gold, oil price, and exchange rates and the connections between the volatilities of these variables during the pandemic. For this aim, we use the ARMA-EGARCH model to measure the impact of volatility and shocks. In other words, it is aimed to measure whether the impact of the shock on the financial variables of the contagiousness of the epidemic is also transmitted to the markets. The data was collected from secondary and daily data from September 2th 2019 to December 20th, 2020. It can be said that the findings obtained have statistically significant effects on the conditional variability of the variables. Therefore, there are findings that the shocks in the market are contaminated with each other.

• The Journal of Fisheries Business Administration
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.1-22
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• 2001

In recent years Korea fisheries have been much more influenced than ever before by domestic and foreign environmental changes such as market liberalization, sustainability, efficiency and effectiveness of domestic fisheries, fisher's welfare etc. Under the wide range of environmental changes, government is carrying out various fisheries policies. However, it seems insufficient to accomplish policy goals under the existing policy instruments. The main focus of the paper is to investigate structural changes and policy directions of fisheries finance in Korea after asian economic crisis. The results of the study are as follows; Fisheries sector in whole economy has been lowering in its proportion. To survive in emerging global competition, fisheries sector is needed structural reformation. In particular the strategy that increases operative efficiency and effectiveness on government financial policy in fisheries sector is much expected. Also, it is necessary to minimize costs, to reform institution and management for increasing efficiency and effectiveness.

• Journal of Industrial Convergence
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.187-216
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• 2004

After Asian financial crisis hit the Korea, Korean government and Korean firms need to restructure their system. Specially financial sector has to renew its system. One way renew its system was adjust company's labor system. The forms of labor adjustment are external numerical flexibility, externalization, internal numerical flexibility, functional flexibility and wage flexibility. These five forms based on two big categories which are wage flexibility and employment flexibility. This study only focus on th effect of employment flexibility in financial sector in Korea. Employment flexibilities can be practice as employment adjustment. Also we concentrate on separation and re-accessors to other financial institute after the separation. The result shows that Korean financial sector are in the range of 10.78% and the job destruction rates are about 11.26%. During the period from year 1998 to year 2002, the numbers of accession has down about 30%. The logit statistical analysis for separation shows that demographical variables and the reasons of separation affected separation and reemployment.