• Health Policy and Management
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.191-198
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• 2017

Moon Jae-in Government announced the Government's 5-Year Plan on July 19, 2017, President Moon directly announced the Government's Plan for Benefit Expansion in National Health Insurance on August 7, 2017. The main contents of the announced expansion include benefit coverage for all medically necessary services with control over non-covered service occurrence, a decrease in the cost-sharing upper limit, and monetary support for catastrophic medical costs. Although past governments have been continuously striving for benefit expansion in the last 15 years, this plan has its breakthrough aspect in that all medical services will be covered by the National Health Insurance. In alignment, there are important tasks to solve: attaining a proper fee schedule, reforming the healthcare delivery system, and improving healthcare quality. This plan is a symptom oriented action in that it is limited in reducing patients' out-of-pocket money, unlike the systematic approach of the National Health Insurance. The sustainability of the National Health Insurance is being threatened due to South Korea's low birth rate, rapidly aging society, and low economic growth, in addition to the unification issue of the Korean Peninsula, medical utilization of the elderly, management of non-communicable diseases, and so on. Therefore, the Government needs to plan the National Health Insurance system reformation including actions addressed toward medical consumers.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.8 no.10
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• pp.239-247
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• 2021

Central Bank authorities should carefully manage inflation rate uncertainties to achieve economic growth and development not only in the short-run but also in the long-run. Since inflation is a key macroeconomic variable, an increased understanding about its behavior is undoubtedly important. Thus, paper employs unit root with breakpoints to examine the mean reverting behavior of inflation rate in the Philippines using monthly data from 2002 to 2020. Empirically, the unit root breakpoint innovational and additive outlier tests favor the stationarity or mean reverting behavior of inflation in the Philippines. Also, results of standard unit root tests, ADF, PP, GLS-Dickey-Fuller, KPSS and NP, provide strong evidence of mean reverting processes. The mean reverting behavior of inflation rate reveals that the monetary policy using inflation targeting framework has succeeded in reducing chronic inflation persistence in the Philippines. Thus, this research supports inflation targeting policy that aims to maintain general price level stability for the Philippine economy's long-term growth and development prospects. The findings of this research remain important for the central bankers for not only providing them better understanding about the behavior of inflation rate, but also helping them formulate and implement policy reforms related to money, credit and banking.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.8 no.5
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• pp.829-837
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• 2021

The study investigates the impact of the Counter-Cyclical Buffer Policy (CCB) on regional development bank profitability in Sumatra, Indonesia. CCB requires banks to hold capital at times when credit is growing rapidly so that the buffer can be reduced if the financial cycle turns down or the economic and financial environment becomes substantially worse. This study employs time series data of regional development banks (RDBs) in Sumatra Island, Indonesia. The methodology applied in this study is a panel dynamic model with Generalized Methods of Moments (GMM). The results show that increasing capital through the implementation of CCB did not have a significant effect on RDBs' profitability. The findings of this study suggest that the activation and implementation of CCB lead to an increase in the amount and cost of loans to companies but do not affect the profitability of RDBs. The value of a Non-Performing Loan (NPL) proved to have a negative and significant effect on bank profitability. The CCB policy aims to overcome the pro-cyclicality of credit growth and improve bank resilience through increased capital which is expected to reduce excessive credit growth as a source of systemic risk. This causes a lack of lending to the community so that the profits obtained by the bank decrease.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.111-118
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• 2023

After the outbreak of the COVID-19 in the early 2020, Korea has attempted to reinforce the existing rent controls to help the low-income households. From July 2000, the tenants' right of lease renewal came into effect, as a policy tool to enforce the upper bound percentage of rent increases within Korea. Purpose: This study aims to examine the impact of rent control on the uncontrolled rents in Seoul Metropolitan Area (SMA). Research design, data and methodology: The study regresses the monthly panel data from 58 municipalities in SMA from January 2020 to March 2022, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results: The data indicates that the policy had the effect of lowering rents for a period of two months, and subsequently monetary policy including quantitative easing and low interest rates, coupled with asset market bubbles lead to rent increases. During the sample data period, the quantity of money supply increased by 12.6% and CPI rose by 3.0%, these phenomena collectively increased the rents by up to 14.7%. Conclusions: The results of the present study support the findings of earlier studies in part: namely, that rent control without the government's steps to stabilize the property price may have an undesirable effect on rental tenants.

• Journal of the Economic Geographical Society of Korea
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.293-302
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• 2002

China in the era of economic transition has conducted the housing reform policy over the past 20 years. Housing providing systems have changed from the free distributing housing system under the governmental planning to the monetary housing system for individual customers. The 1998 monetary housing distribution policy, which ended the 20-year Chinese housing reform, departed from the direct distribution system that had blocked housing commodification. The purpose of the housing reform was to provide and reproduce housing without the expenses of the Chinese government and work unit (danwei), which is different from Russia. In order to achieve the housing reform, the Chinese government introduced various policies, which enabled residents to purchase housing by themselves. However, it took long for residents, who had taken government's welfare system granted, to accept housing as goods. In addition, the Chinese government's efforts to reproduce housing by market systems failed because housing was closely linked to land and was expensive consumption goods, which differentiates housing from other goods that can be commodified through market prices and diverse ownerships. Accordingly, despite a political burden, the Chinese government waived the real distribution policy for housing. After the waiver, the housing commodification process excelled through the private housing markets.

• Informatization Policy
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.91-106
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• 2012

We should set up a policy objective to obtain consumer engagement in smart grid and analyze the key influencing factors in smart grid consumer engagement in oder to deploy smart grid successfully. It is because the successful deployment of smart grid depends on whether the end users accept the smart grid products and services. So far, There have been few studies in Korea which focus on the smart grid consumer engagement. Therefore, we carried out an literature review in terms of smart grid consumer engagement and tried to suggest related policy implications. As a result, we identified key influencing factors such as monetary benefits, environment-friendly characteristics, cyber security and understanding of smart grid. Futhermore, we suggested policy implications related to customer education, linkage between smart grid policies and other environmental ones, cyber security enhancement, etc.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Environmental Restoration Technology
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.69-79
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• 2014

Coastal wetlands are among the most productive biomes in the Earth. The economic values include the direct use of a coastal wetland's ecosystem services, such as food, raw materials, recreation, and tourism. Other values comprise the indirect use of a coastal wetland's ecosystem services, such as carbon sequestration, waste-water treatment, and erosion prevention. In particular, Suncheon Bay is recently attracting attention as the most successful case of the preservation and restoration. This study applies Travel Cost Method (TCM) to estimate the economic value by drawing the demand curve for trips to Suncheon Bay. The TCM is an approach used for economic valuation of non-market goods and services. Based on the results of TCM, this study shows that the economic benefit from recreational uses of the site adds up to \174.7 billion per year. It is also significant in the sense that monetary information is suggested to help local policy makers evaluate the realistic values of coastal wetlands.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.115-128
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• 2019

The study aims to investigate the pattern of relationships such as symmetric or asymmetric, between exchange rate and foreign direct investment in Bangladesh by applying Autoregressive Distributed Lagged (ARDL) and nonlinear ARDL. In this study, we employed quarterly data for the period of 1974Q1 to 2016Q4. Data were collected and aggregated from various sources namely, Bangladesh Economic Review published by Ministry of Finance and statistical yearbook published by Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics and an annual report published by Bangladesh Bank. The relationship between exchange rate and FDI inflows attract immense interest in the recent periods, especially for developing countries' perspective. The results of the study ascertain the long run relationship between FDI, exchange rate, monetary policy, and fiscal policy. Considering the asymmetric assumption, the findings from NARDL confirm the existence of a long-run asymmetric relationship in the empirical equation. In the long run, it is observed that positive change that is the appreciation of exchange rate against USD decrease FDI inflows and negative shocks results in grater inflows of FDI, however, the positive shocks produce higher intensity that negative shocks in Exchange rate. For directional causality, the coefficients of error correction term confirm long-run causality, in particular, bidirectional causality unveiled between FDI and exchange rate.

• Journal of the Korean Home Economics Association
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.77-90
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• 2007

Using 2004 Household Income & Expenditure Survey, this study investigated difference in consumption pattern among the households with the different number of children, and estimated the monetary cost of rearing children. The findings were as following. First, the major consumption categories for raising children included the expenditures for education, food materials, utility, health, and communication. Second, the potential consumption needs for clothing & foot ware and culture & entertainment were not fully satisfied for the households with children compared to the households without children. Third, in the households with one child, the level of consumption was about two thirds of that in the households without children. It was slightly above half in the households with two children. Lower consumption level of the households with children was mainly due to the burden of the educational expenditure. Forth, the average monthly cost of raising children was estimated by 680 thousands Won for one child, and 104 thousand Won for two children. Lastly, the implications for the fertility policy and the methods for the estimation of the child cost were suggested based on the results.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.5-9
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• 2018

Many developing countries have attempted to depreciate their currencies in order to make their products cheaper, stimulate exports, shift aggregate demand to the right, and increase aggregate output. However, currency depreciation tends to increase import prices, raise domestic inflation, reduce capital inflows, and shift aggregate supply to the left. The net impact is unclear. The paper incorporates the monetary policy function in the model, which is determined by the inflation gap, the output gap, the real effective exchange rate, and the world real interest rate. Applying an extended IS-MP-AS model (Romer, 2000), the paper finds that real depreciation raised real GDP during 1997.Q1-2005.Q3 whereas real appreciation increased real GDP during 2005.Q4-2017.Q2. In addition, a higher government debt-to-GDP ratio, a lower U.S. real federal funds rate, a higher real stock price, a lower real oil price or a lower expected inflation rate would help increase real GDP. Hence, real depreciation or real appreciation may increase or reduce aggregate output, depending upon the level of economic development. Although expansionary fiscal policy is effective in stimulating the economy, caution needs to be exercised as there may be a debt threshold beyond which a further increase in the debt-to-GDO ratio would hurt economic growth.