• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.47 no.4
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• pp.522-540
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• 2012

The main aim of the paper is to identify the position or status of Korean economic geography in changing global economic geography by reviewing papers published in Korean geographical journals since the mid-1950s. Since the late 20th century as economic geography has developed significantly with the introduction of new research issues, methodologies, and theory and concepts, economic geography in Korea also has gone through rapid development in terms of both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. The paper attempts to analyze trends in Korean economic geography by reviewing agricultural, industrial, commercial geographies, and others since the mid-1950s. The review of economic geography in Korea would be based on four periods classified by research issues and approaches; foundation (~1950s), positioning (1960s and 1970s), jump and rush (1980s and mid-1990s), and transitional period (late 1990s~). Agricultural geography in Korea has decreased due to increases of the interests in industrial geography since the 1980s. In particular, since the late 1990s industrial geography has undergone a significant transition in accordance with the emergence of new theories of institutional perspectives, centering around issues on value chains, innovative cluster, cooperative and competitive networks, foreign direct investment, flexible specialization and venture ecology. Along with this, there has been changes in the interest of commercial geography in Korea from researches on periodical markets, the structure of store formats, and distributions by commodity, to researches on producer services and retailer's locational behaviors and commercial supremacy according to the emergence of new store formats. Since the late 1990s, many researches and discussions associated with the new economic geography began to emerge in Korea. Various research issues are focused on analyzing changes of local, regional and global economic spaces and their processes in relation to institutional perspectives, knowledge and innovation, production chain and innovative networks, industrial clusters and RIS, and geographies of service. Although economic geography in Korea has developed significantly both in quantitative and qualitative perspectives, we pointed out that it has still limited in some specific scope and issues. Therefore, it is likely to imply that its scope and issues should be diversified with new perspectives and approaches.