• Journal of Environmental Policy
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.1-40
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• 2008

In this paper, I examine the welfare effects of various revenue-neutral tax reforms in the case of two vertically-related oligopolies(downstream and upstream), where the upstream industry is polluting. I show analytically when and how government can improve welfare by initiating various tax reforms, regardless of either the feasibility of a lump sum transfer or the availability of a tax on pollution. The profit wedge that is the difference between the unit price and the unit cost and the marginal environmental damages(MED) becomes important to decidethe direction of a tax reform and is crucial to determine the direction of welfare-improving tax-subsidy schemes. I also show that a tax on pollution(Pigouvian tax) is superior to a tax on intermediate good even in the case of vertically-related oligopolies, because the former always brings in positive welfare effect from the upstream firms' input substitutability, which a tax on intermediate good cannot provide. Some policy implications for 'reducing environmentally-harmful subsidies' are also discussed.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.17 no.sup3
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• pp.269-273
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• 2016

Presently, the world population of the elderly is growing. By improving health hygiene and welfare indicators, mortality and birth rates decrease and life expectancy increases, making the present century the century of elderly. Aging is one of the main risk factors for development of cancer, which itself is the second cause of death in old people. This study was conducted to assess the prevalence of cancer in the elderly covered by the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) insurance program and to obtain suitable programs for cancer screening and early detection, increase patient survival, improve elderly care and to reclaim the cost of treatment in comparison to the national and international statistics. This is a cross-sectional study conducted on all elderly patients diagnosed with malignancy based on their pathology reports. In this study, of the total 75,500 patients covered by IRIB insurance, 17.2% belonged to the elderly group, males accounting for 53.3%. The most common cancers in old men were prostatic cancer (61.3%), colon cancer (10.3%) cancer of the hematologic system, bladder cancer (9.6%), lung cancer (9.1%), thyroid cancer (3.9%) and brain tumors (1.3%). In the elderly women, the most common cancers were breast cancer (80.1%), colon cancer (5.1%), thyroid cancers (4.4%), bladder and hematologic system malignancies (3.6), lung cancer (2.9%) and brain tumors (0.7%). In addition, the prevalence of cancer was almost the same as national and international statistics. With the exception of non-melanoma skin cancer no difference was shown in prevalence of cancer between IRIB elderly patients and the other groups of cancer patients in Iran.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.13 no.10
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• pp.2030-2038
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• 2009

We analyze the economic effects of mobile termination rate asymmetry by simulation model. The asymmetry allows the mobile operator to get access profits at the expense of the incumbent and induces negative effects such as the entry of inefficient operator and allocative efficiency as well as productive efficiency. We use simulation model to investigate the effect on social welfare of asymmetric regulation. If the brand loyalty is high, social welfare increase as the termination charge of entrant increases. The extension of the basic model shows that the degree of social welfare increase becomes higher as the brand loyalty increases when the cost of entrant is smaller than that of incumbent. But, the degree of social welfare decrease becomes lower as the substitution effects increase.

• Journal of Korea Trade
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.1-20
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• 2021

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine the welfare effects of standards harmonization between technologically asymmetric countries, and to determine optimal harmonization strategies for a country with mid-level technological advancement. Design/methodology - Following Salop's circular city model (Salop, 1979), this study constructs a simple, horizontally-differentiated oligopoly model in which three firms and three countries exist. Each country adopts different compatibility standards and each firm incurs conversion costs for foreign market access due to differences in standards. The conversion costs are related to technology; standards harmonization removes these costs between participating countries. The paper considers three cases: i) no harmonization; ii) harmonization with the more technologically-advanced country and iii) harmonization with the less technologically-advanced country. Findings - The paper first considers a scenario in which all three firms occupy some share of the market in each country. It shows that standards harmonization with both the technologically moreor less-advanced country always increases consumer surplus and social welfare. In addition, the producer surplus will increase if the harmonization partner has a higher technology level, whereas it may decrease if the partner has a lower technology level. It also shows that if most domestic export goods are in sectors with conversion costs above a certain level, harmonizing standards with a technologically more-advanced country should be prioritized. Such strategies, moreover, should be emphasized when there exists a large technology gap among countries. Lastly, the paper considers another scenario, in which harmonization leads to the foreclosure of the non-member firm from the member countries' markets. It shows that harmonization improves the social welfare of a mid-level technology country regardless of its partner's technology. It also shows that the country should prioritize harmonization with the technologically less-advanced country. Originality/value - Though some of the existing studies consider the welfare effects of harmonization, their main assumption is that firms have the same conversion technology. Since complying with standards often requires substantial technological advancement and technical expertise, harmonization of compatibility standards between countries with gaps in technological ability carries different implications. This paper investigates the welfare effects of this harmonization and determines an optimal harmonization strategy while considering technological asymmetry among countries in standards compliance.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.57 no.4
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• pp.67-90
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• 2005

The purpose of this study is to analyze factors to affect low fertility and to investigate its implications to social welfare. For the purpose, I surveyed 360 married women and men in Gyeongnam province, and employed multi-regression, logistic regression model to process the data. I analyzed factors to influence low fertility in three aspects: demographic feature, socio-economic status, and personal sense of value. The results of analysis can be summarized as follows: (1) the period of marriage in demographic feature, income level in social economic status, and the necessity of children in personal sense of value are important factors to affect the current fertility level, (2) period of marriage, total numbers of children, gender of the first child are determining the future childbirth in demographic feature. Secondly, income level is interrelated to the future childbirth in socio-economic status. Thirdly, in the aspect of personal values, how much one needs to get married, how much one prefers son to daughter, how much one relies on one's children to realize one's dream are interrelated to the future childbirth, (3) the cost of bringing up a child as well as he expense of private education, lacking of a day nursery, and economic difficulty are causes to make people to postpone or give up childbirth. These results suggest that development of population policy to promote women's social participation and to strengthen family welfare as well as social welfare is necessary. These also implicates that if we pursue integrated policies on women, childcare, and education, we can get much more effective population welfare policy.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.141-156
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• 2013

Researchers in welfare services of local government in Korea have rather been on isolated issues as disables, childcare, aging phenomenon, etc. (Kang, 2004; Jung et al., 2009). Lately, local officials, yet, realize that they need more comprehensive welfare services for all residents, not just for above-mentioned focused groups. Still cases dealt with focused group approach have been a main research stream due to various reason(Jung et al., 2009; Lee, 2009; Jang, 2011). Social Security Information System is an information system that comprehensively manages 292 welfare benefits provided by 17 ministries and 40 thousand welfare services provided by 230 local authorities in Korea. The purpose of the system is to improve efficiency of social welfare delivery process. The study of local government expenditure has been on the rise over the last few decades after the restarting the local autonomy, but these studies have limitations on data collection. Measurement of a local government's welfare efforts(spending) has been primarily on expenditures or budget for an individual, set aside for welfare. This practice of using monetary value for an individual as a "proxy value" for welfare effort(spending) is based on the assumption that expenditure is directly linked to welfare efforts(Lee et al., 2007). This expenditure/budget approach commonly uses total welfare amount or percentage figure as dependent variables (Wildavsky, 1985; Lee et al., 2007; Kang, 2000). However, current practice of using actual amount being used or percentage figure as a dependent variable may have some limitation; since budget or expenditure is greatly influenced by the total budget of a local government, relying on such monetary value may create inflate or deflate the true "welfare effort" (Jang, 2012). In addition, government budget usually contain a large amount of administrative cost, i.e., salary, for local officials, which is highly unrelated to the actual welfare expenditure (Jang, 2011). This paper used local government welfare service data from the detailed data sets linked to the Social Security Information System. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the factors that affect social welfare spending of 230 local authorities in 2012. The paper applied multiple regression based model to analyze the pooled financial data from the system. Based on the regression analysis, the following factors affecting self-funded welfare spending were identified. In our research model, we use the welfare budget/total budget(%) of a local government as a true measurement for a local government's welfare effort(spending). Doing so, we exclude central government subsidies or support being used for local welfare service. It is because central government welfare support does not truly reflect the welfare efforts(spending) of a local. The dependent variable of this paper is the volume of the welfare spending and the independent variables of the model are comprised of three categories, in terms of socio-demographic perspectives, the local economy and the financial capacity of local government. This paper categorized local authorities into 3 groups, districts, and cities and suburb areas. The model used a dummy variable as the control variable (local political factor). This paper demonstrated that the volume of the welfare spending for the welfare services is commonly influenced by the ratio of welfare budget to total local budget, the population of infants, self-reliance ratio and the level of unemployment factor. Interestingly, the influential factors are different by the size of local government. Analysis of determinants of local government self-welfare spending, we found a significant effect of local Gov. Finance characteristic in degree of the local government's financial independence, financial independence rate, rate of social welfare budget, and regional economic in opening-to-application ratio, and sociology of population in rate of infants. The result means that local authorities should have differentiated welfare strategies according to their conditions and circumstances. There is a meaning that this paper has successfully proven the significant factors influencing welfare spending of local government in Korea.

• 한국사회정책
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.119-147
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• 2012

This paper aims to explore whether the trilemma of welfare states has been a valid argument about the recent change of welfare states. Based on fuzzy-set ideal type analysis of data from seventeen OECD countries, it examines that welfare states have achieved three core policy objectives -income equality, employment growth and fiscal discipline- in the service economy during the period between 1981 and 2010. The evidence presented in this paper does not support the trilemma of the service economy where only two goals can be pursued successfully at one time, at a cost of the other remained goal. The trilemma has been effective only to the countries in liberal welfare regime where employment growth and fiscal discipline has been achieved at a cost of higher levels of income equality. However, conservative welfare-state regimes have experienced the deterioration of income equality and fiscal restraint after the mid 1980s and it seems that they have diverged into various models. In the countries of the social democratic welfare regime, the goals of equality and employment have been achieved simultaneously together with fiscal discipline since the early 2000s. While they are classified as the perfect model in the research, Southern European welfare states including Greece and Italy, classified as 'the crisis model', have not performed well in all the three aspects. On the evidence presented in this paper, it can be said that the trilemma of welfare states in the service economy is not effective to explain the policy goals of welfare state as well as the result of redistributive politics in the service economy.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.501-512
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• 2012

Social welfare maximization in a double-sided auction market is performed by implementing an aggregation-based particle swarm optimization (CAPSO) algorithm for optimal placement and sizing of one Static Synchronous Series Compensator (SSSC) device. Dallied simulation results (without/with line flow constraints and without/with SSSC) are generated to demonstrate the impact of SSSC on the congestion levels of the modified IEEE 14-bus test system. The proposed CAPSO algorithm employs conventional quadratic smooth and augmented quadratic nonsmooth generator cost curves with sine components to improve the accurate of the model by incorporating the valve loading effects. CAPSO also employs quadratic smooth consumer benefit functions. The proposed approach relies on particle swarm optimization to capture the near-optimal GenCos and DisCos, as well as the location and rating of SSSC while the Newton based load flow solution minimizes the mismatch equations. Simulation results of the proposed CAPSO algorithm are compared to solutions obtained by sequential quadratic programming (SQP) and a recently implemented Fuzzy based genetic algorithm (Fuzzy-GA). The main contributions are inclusion of customer benefit in the congestion management objective function, consideration of nonsmooth generator characteristics and the utilization of a coordinated aggregation-based PSO for locating/sizing of SSSC.

• Journal of Families and Better Life
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.1-12
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• 2004

This study was designed to search for the direction to develop housing service which assists the older people to live independently in their community and provides the systematization of community care. The subjects of the research include 533 older people between the age of 60 to 79 residing in Seoul and 84 welfare officials at a dong(in)-office and 67 social workers working at comprehensive social welfare institutions. The results were as follows: Both demanders and deliverers recognized that housing service for older people was necessary for community care, and, in particular, the deliverers had higher degree of necessity as people charged in welfare service. The most needed service was community alarm service which currently is proceeded partially for low-income and living-alone olders. It needed to expand the scope of the people to be served. It appeared that the need for inside safety measures rather than for housing space or structural problems. It requires less effort and cost for those who need simple repair, such as safety grips or slippery protection, and safety checks. Among financial support services, the need for tax benefits appeared the most necessary service for the older people. It suggested that more 'direct' financial support service is needed for the elderly people.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.493-504
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• 2011

The present paper presents a genetic algorithm (GA) to maximize social welfare and perform congestion management by optimally placing and sizing one Thyristor-Controlled Series Capacitor (TCSC) device in a double-sided auction market. Simulation results, with line flow constraints before and after the compensation, are compared through the Sequential Quadratic Programming SQP method, and are used to analyze the effect of TCSC on the congestion levels of modified IEEE 14-bus and 30-bus test systems. Quadratic, smooth and nonsmooth (with sine components due to valve point loading effect) generator cost curves, and quadratic smooth consumer benefit functions are considered. The main aims of the present study are the inclusion of customer benefit in the social welfare maximization and congestion management objective function, the consideration of nonsmooth generator characteristics, and the optimal locating and sizing of the TCSC using real code-based GA to guarantee fast convergence to the best solution.