• Journal of Arbitration Studies
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.91-120
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• 2020

The Scope of Application of North Korea's Foreign Economic Arbitration Act and Foreign Investment Act This article examines whether the Foreign Economic Arbitration Act and the Foreign Investment Act of North Korea apply to South Korean parties or companies. This article analyzes laws and agreements related to economic cooperation between South Korea and North Korea. Furthermore, this article compares and evaluates laws related to foreign investment and enacted in North Korea. Now, North Korea's door is closed due to economic sanctions against it, but it will be opened soon. Thus, this article prepares for the future opening of North Korea's markets. Is there a rule of laws in North Korea or just a ruler? Are there laws in North Korea? North Korea has enacted a number of legislation to attract foreign investors, referring to those Chinese laws. For example, North Korea enacted the Foreigner Investment Act, the Foreigner Company Act, the Foreign Investment Bank Act, the Foreign Economic Arbitration Act, the Foreign Economic Contract Act, the International Trade Act, and the Free Economy and Trade Zone Act, among others. Article 2 (2) of the Foreign Investment Law of North Korea states, "Foreign investors are corporations and individuals from other countries investing in our country." It is interpreted that South Korea is not included in the "other countries" of this definition. According to many mutual agreements signed by South Korea and North Korea, the relationship between the two Koreas is a special relation inside the Korean ethnic group. An arbitration between a South Korean party and a North Korean party has the characteristics of both domestic arbitrations and international arbitrations. If the South Korea and North Korea Commercial Arbitration Commission or the Kaesong Industrial Complex Arbitration Commission is not established, the possibility of arbitration by the Chosun International Trade Arbitration Commission, established under North Korea's Foreign Economic Arbitration Act, should be examined. There have been no cases where the Foreign Economic Arbitration Act is applied to disputes between parties of South Korea and North Korea. It might be possible to apply the Foreign Economic Arbitration Act by recognizing the "foreign factor" of a dispute between the South Korean party and North Korean party. It is necessary to raise legislative clarifications by revising the North Korea's Foreign Economic Arbitration Act as to whether Korean parties or companies are included in the scope of this Act's application. Even if it is interpreted that South Korean parties or companies are not included in the scope of North Korea's Foreign Economic Arbitration Act, disputes between South Korean companies and North Korean companies can be resolved by foreign arbitration institutes such as CIETAC in China, HKIAC in Hong Kong, or SIAC in Singapore. Such arbitration awards could be enforced in North Korea pursuant to Article 64 of North Korea's Foreign Economic Arbitration Act. This is because the arbitration awards of foreign arbitration institutes are included in the scope of North Korea's Foreign Economic Arbitration Act. The matter is how to enforce the North Korean laws when a North Korean party or North Korean government does not abide by the laws or their contracts. It is essential for North Korea to join the New York Convention (Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards) and the ICSID Convention (Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes Between States and Nationals of Other States).

• Korea Trade Review
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• v.48 no.1
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• pp.215-241
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• 2023

As competition between ports intensifies, port efficiency has always been a hot topic in the port and shipping economy. Boosting regional and national economies by improving port efficiency and promoting sustainable development of ports is also a concern for port operators and local and national governments. In this situation, this study has the following objectives. First, using panel data from 2010 to 2017, the efficiency of 14 major inland ports along the Yangtze River was analyzed, and changes in port efficiency over time were examined. Second, 14 inland ports are divided into the middle, upper, and lower Yangtze River port groups to compare and review differences in efficiency levels of ports by basin. For the study, we applied a three-step DEA analysis method, which evaluated the pure relative efficiency of the port itself by removing the effects of environmental factors and statistical noise that could affect the efficiency evaluation and presented the results. As a result, it was confirmed that there was a clear difference in the efficiency value of the port between the first-stage and the third-stage efficiency evaluation result. In addition, the downstream ports showed relatively high efficiency compared to the middle and upstream ports.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.165-175
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• 2012

Recently, accumulation of technology, transfer, absorption, and commercialization is being significantly recognized as a key factor for sustainable growth of the 21st century global economy. The government established "Technology Transfer and Commercialization Promotion Act" In order that the technology developed at public research institutions can be transferred to the private sector and commercialized; the technology developed in the private sector can be traded and commercialized. Also, the Article 14 of "Technology Transfer and Commercialization Promotion Act" is concerning technology transfer agents' registration, promotion, and support: it introduced the special status system of technology transfer agents and the government registers, manages, and supervises it. In most developed countries, the technology transfer agency is transferred to the private sector and it is referred as a technology transfer agent or technology broker. In the domestic market, despite the introduction of the above special status system and the building a various organization and transfer medium system for boosting the market's revitalization, some problems occurred; because the registration system of a technology transfer agent and legal basis and system about its following-up control fall short. For example, recently technology transfer-related performance exemption has brought the activation of technology transfer agent's registration, but there was the limit of selecting the expert above a certain level. Therefore, some countermeasures for this are urgent, In addition, through a compulsory training completion system before the technology trade agent registration is prepared, a short period of curriculum was not sufficient to provide applicants various specialized knowledge. In this research, it is considered about the reform of technology transfer agent through its comparative study in China and Korea. Some improvements are suggested for expanding the market of technology transfer commercialization, assuring the agents' service and strengthening the competitiveness.

• Journal of Ginseng Culture
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• v.1
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• pp.11-27
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• 2019

The Jurchens, the ancestors of the Qing Manchus, had lived scattered in Manchuria and had made their living mostly on ginseng gathering and animal hunting. Their residential areas, rich with deep forest and numerous rivers, provided great habitation for all kinds of flora and fauna, but not so proper for agriculture. Based on their activities of foraging and hunting, the Jurchens developed a unique social organization that was later transformed into the Banner System, the most distinctive Qing military institution. By the sixteenth century, that the external trade brought considerable changes to Jurchen society. A huge amount of foreign silver, imported from Japan and South America to China, first invigorated commercial economy in China proper, and later caused a huge influence on Ming frontier regions, including Manchuria. In the late sixteenth century when the tradition of foraging and hunting encountered with silver economy, the Jurchen tribes became unified after years of competition and transformed themselves into the Manchus to build the Qing empire in 1636. In 1644 the Manchus succeeded in conquering the China Proper and moved into Beijing. Even after that, the Manchu imperial court never forgot the value of Manchurii ginseng; instead, they paid great efforts to monopolize this profitable root. Until the late seventeenth century, the Qing court used the Banner System to manage Manchurian ginseng. The banner soldiers stationed in Manchuria checked unauthorized civilian entrances in this frontier and protected its ginseng producing mountains from the Han Chinese people. All the process of ginseng gathering was managed by the institutions under the direct control of the imperial court, such as the Imperial Household Department, the Butha Ula Office, and the Three Upper Banner in Shengjing. Banner soldiers were dispatched to the given mountains, collect the given amount of ginseng, and send them to the imperial court in Beijing. The state monopoly of ginseng was maintained throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries under the principle that Manchuria and its natural resources should be guarded from civilian encroachment. At the same time, Manchurian ginseng was considered as an important source of state revenue. The imperial court and financial bureau wanted to collect ginseng as much as they needed. By the late seventeenth century as the ginseng management by the banner soldiers failed in securing the ginseng tax, the Qing court began to invite civil merchants to ginseng business. During the eighteenth century the Qing ginseng policy became more dependent on civil merchants, both their money and management. In 1853 the Qing finally ended the ginseng monopoly, but it was before the early eighteenth century that wealthy merchants hired ginseng gatherers and paid ginseng tax to the state. The Qing monopoly of ginseng was in fact maintained by the active participation of civil merchants in the ginseng business.

• Journal of Arbitration Studies
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.47-69
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• 2010

From the review of Korean arbitration systems with the comparison of those of other countries, we can summarize some issues to be tackled as follows: First, Korean arbitration system started with the purpose of export promotion. This may be the main reason that various domestic disputes have not been resolved by arbitration. Second, the Korean Arbitration Law applies to private disputes. The Law's arbitration scope is wider than that of China and France, but narrower than that of the U.S.A. that encompasses a variety of disputes in the filed of consumer, labor, medical services, patents, etc. Third, active judges or public officials in Korea can not be arbitrator and there is no arbitration court. However, if chief judge allows the necessity, court's judges in the UK can be arbitrator with the mutual agreement of the parties and also arbitration system is operated in the court. Fourth, the Korean Commercial Arbitration Board(KCAB), the only representative institution for arbitration in Korea, is under the Ministry of Knowledge Economy(MKE). This makes it difficult for the KCAB to handle other disputes related to the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the Ministry of Strategy and Finance, the Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, the Ministry of Employment and Labor, etc. Fifth, as mentioned, the KCAB is the unique institution for arbitration by the Law in Korea, while other countries allow have a diversity of arbitration agencies such as maritime arbitration organization, consumer arbitration institution, arbitration court, etc. Therefore, we suggest some ideas to expand the arbitration's area of coverage in Korea as follows: First, there should be more active policies that promote various domestic disputes to be settled by the arbitration system. Second, it is quite needed to expand the scope of arbitration to cover many disputes in the fields of consumer, labor, medical service, advertising, fair trade, etc. Third, there should be discussions to allow court judges as arbitrator and to introduce the arbitration court. Fourth, the KCAB should strengthen its status and roles as general arbitration organization to overcome the limited scope of commercial disputes. For this, there should be the strong support and coordination among the MKE and other government agencies. Fifth, to reduce the burden of the court's complicated and expensive procedures, more efficient disputes resolution systems should be established on the basis of the parties' free will. Each central government agency should streamline the legal barriers to allow industrial organizations under its control to establish their own or joint arbitration system with the KCAB.

• Journal of Korea Port Economic Association
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.363-384
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• 2008

This study aims at improving Korea's competitiveness in port logistics through marketing strategy with integrating the conceptual approach into the empirical one and combining both the oldest military treatise and the newest evaluating model in social science that was applied by the HFP(hierarchical fuzzy process) model enhanced by the KJ method. The empirical results of this study show Busan in the middle among subject ports. At present, Korea plays a reciprocal role in the port market in East Asia, but in the medium- and long-term, Korea's ports will vie together with most major ports in the East Asian region. A descriptive investigation shows that Korea's developing tasks in port logistics must be considered in the context of the direction for developing port policies, the necessity of expanding port facilities in the capital region, securing the sufficient traffic volume through the establishment of the hinterland linking system and its positive utilization, and reforming the direction for developing the global logistics through increased port competitiveness. In the short- and medium-term, Korea must use the opportunity factor of 'Growth and open door policy of China' as a geoeconomic advantage and to utilize Korea's ports as a gate to Chinese foreign trade. With the rise of China's economy, China also plays a significant role in both port and airport markets. Hence, the linking system between the two must be established to meet the expanding traffic volume, especially in the capital area. Moreover, it is necessary for Korea to secure port logistics through the establishment of the hinterland linking system and its positive utilization. The great accomplishment of this paper is to present strategies to increase Korea's port competitiveness in the rapidly changing environments of world logistics with the focus on both the oldest military strategic treatise and the newest empirical method in social science. In order to reinforce this study, it needs further compensative research because the evaluation structure could be subdivided with more extensive and precise criteria.

• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
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• v.37 no.4
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• pp.509-523
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• 2024

This study estimates connectedness index among the US, China, Europe, Japan, and South Korea using monthly economic policy uncertainty (EPU) data from January 2000 to December 2023. The connectedness index allows us to analyze the effect of global economic uncertainty on domestic economic uncertainty. The EPU is used as a proxy for economic uncertainty. Inter-country connectedness index is computed from variance decomposition. The findings from forecast error variance decomposition show that three-fourths of total uncertainty comes from economic uncertainty in the own country and one-fourth of total uncertainty comes from economic uncertainty in the others. The analysis on net pairwise connectedness reveals that, even though the extent of the effect of economic uncertainty in one country from economic uncertainty in another country varies over time, economic uncertainty in South Korea, a small-open economy, is mainly affected by economic uncertainty in the others. The reverse situation rarely happens except in the specific occurrence such as the collapse of the credit bubble in 2003 and the subsequent years, the inter-Korean summit and North Korea-the US summit in 2018, and the period from the first outbreak of COVID-19 on the implementation of the government's severe regulation against COVID-19.

• Environmental and Resource Economics Review
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.587-635
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• 2009

The purpose of this study is to develop the Global Dynamic Computable General Equilibrium Model (Global CGE Model) in order to produce an economic impact analysis, including prospective obligations for the Post-2012 regime. This model explores the impact of an international emissions trading market and macroeconomic variables such as GNP, consumption, investment, imports and exports, in accordance with potential increased obligations on the Republic of Korea. Distinguishing it from existing studies, this Global CGE Model divides the global community into major economic groups, and in the capacity of the analyzed global model, reflecting the principle nations' macroeconomic indicators through the theoretical approach of endogenous growth theory. Policies such as an emissions trading scheme and carbon tax are reflected in the model. Also, in particular, the model reflects exogenous technological advances. According to this analysis, the stronger the greenhouse gas reductions, the greater the adverse effects on the economy; among macroeconomic indicators that appear, a significant decline is realized in the balance of trade, along with a significant decrease in investment and consumption. Energy dependence, in particular, plays a large role-varying in degree by industry type-, as greenhouse gas reductions would have a greater impact on energy-intensive industries. Furthermore, if Korea, currently recognized as a developing country, is given the obligation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, competing countries such as China and other developing countries will be given an advantage.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.169-206
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• 2009

This study stems from a question, "How should we understand the pattern of the Korean economy after the 1990s?" Among various analytic methods applicable, this study chooses a Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) with long-run restrictions, identifies diverse impacts that gave rise to the current status of the Korean economy, and differentiates relative contributions of those impacts. To that end, SVAR is applied to four economic models; Blanchard and Quah (1989)'s 2-variable model, its 3-variable extensions, and the two other New Keynesian type linear models modified from Stock and Watson (2002). Especially, the latter two models are devised to reflect the recent transitions in the determination of foreign exchange rate (from a fixed rate regime to a flexible rate one) as well as the monetary policy rule (from aggregate targeting to inflation targeting). When organizing the assumed results in the form of impulse response and forecasting error variance decomposition, two common denominators are found as follows. First, changes in the rate of economic growth are mainly attributable to the impact on productivity, and such trend has grown strong since the 2000s, which indicates that Korea's economic growth since the 2000s has been closely associated with its potential growth rate. Second, the magnitude or consistency of impact responses tends to have subsided since the 2000s. Given Korea's high dependence on trade, it is possible that low interest rates, low inflation, steady growth, and the economic emergence of China as a world player have helped secure capital and demand for export and import, which therefore might reduced the impact of each sector on overall economic status. Despite the fact that a diverse mixture of models and impacts has been used for analysis, always two common findings are observed in the result. Therefore, it can be concluded that the decreased rate of economic growth of Korea since 2000 appears to be on the same track as the decrease in Korea's potential growth rate. The contents of this paper are constructed as follows: The second section observes the recent trend of the economic development of Korea and related Korean articles, which might help in clearly defining the scope and analytic methodology of this study. The third section provides an analysis model to be used in this study, which is Structural VAR as mentioned above. Variables used, estimation equations, and identification conditions of impacts are explained. The fourth section reports estimation results derived by the previously introduced model, and the fifth section concludes.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.69-88
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• 2022

One of the characteristics of South Korea's economic structure is that it is highly dependent on exports. Thus, many businesses are closely related to the global economy and diplomatic situation. In addition, small and medium-sized enterprises(SMEs) specialized in exporting are struggling due to the spread of COVID-19. Therefore, this study aimed to develop a model to forecast exports for next year to support SMEs' export strategy and decision making. Also, this study proposed a strategy to recommend promising export countries of each item based on the forecasting model. We analyzed important variables used in previous studies such as country-specific, item-specific, and macro-economic variables and collected those variables to train our prediction model. Next, through the exploratory data analysis(EDA) it was found that exports, which is a target variable, have a highly skewed distribution. To deal with this issue and improve predictive performance, we suggest a separated learning method. In a separated learning method, the whole dataset is divided into homogeneous subgroups and a prediction algorithm is applied to each group. Thus, characteristics of each group can be more precisely trained using different input variables and algorithms. In this study, we divided the dataset into five subgroups based on the exports to decrease skewness of the target variable. After the separation, we found that each group has different characteristics in countries and goods. For example, In Group 1, most of the exporting countries are developing countries and the majority of exporting goods are low value products such as glass and prints. On the other hand, major exporting countries of South Korea such as China, USA, and Vietnam are included in Group 4 and Group 5 and most exporting goods in these groups are high value products. Then we used LightGBM(LGBM) and Exponential Moving Average(EMA) for prediction. Considering the characteristics of each group, models were built using LGBM for Group 1 to 4 and EMA for Group 5. To evaluate the performance of the model, we compare different model structures and algorithms. As a result, it was found that the separated learning model had best performance compared to other models. After the model was built, we also provided variable importance of each group using SHAP-value to add explainability of our model. Based on the prediction model, we proposed a second-stage recommendation strategy for potential export countries. In the first phase, BCG matrix was used to find Star and Question Mark markets that are expected to grow rapidly. In the second phase, we calculated scores for each country and recommendations were made according to ranking. Using this recommendation framework, potential export countries were selected and information about those countries for each item was presented. There are several implications of this study. First of all, most of the preceding studies have conducted research on the specific situation or country. However, this study use various variables and develops a machine learning model for a wide range of countries and items. Second, as to our knowledge, it is the first attempt to adopt a separated learning method for exports prediction. By separating the dataset into 5 homogeneous subgroups, we could enhance the predictive performance of the model. Also, more detailed explanation of models by group is provided using SHAP values. Lastly, this study has several practical implications. There are some platforms which serve trade information including KOTRA, but most of them are based on past data. Therefore, it is not easy for companies to predict future trends. By utilizing the model and recommendation strategy in this research, trade related services in each platform can be improved so that companies including SMEs can fully utilize the service when making strategies and decisions for exports.