• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.29-61
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• 2016

This paper explains the one of the most problematic factor in the society that leads to social inequality - increase in non-regular work. Theoretically, this expansion of non-regular work can be explained by technologies that are designed to save the labor force, especially since corporations in Korea have strategies to replace the regular workers with temporary workers, to save money. OECD also noted that Korea's income inequality is pretty high in ranking when compared with the rest of the OECD members, and says that globalization and technological innovation are the factors of this problem. To refine the argument, this study also looks at relationship between development made in sciences - which can be stated as a proxy variable to look at the advances made in technology - and expansion of temporary work force by using VAR methodology. Based on the results of this analysis in the future temporary/regular workers ratio started with decline, then turn to rise. These temporary/regular workers ratio sustained growth prediction shows that the expansion of the temporary expansion contributes to instability and social inequality in the labor market and technological change are interrelated.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.211-238
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• 2005

Korea is far behind other OECD countries in economy-wise productivity: Korea's labor productivity in terms of GDP per hour worked is the lowest among OECD countries. Against the existing productivity gap, there is a worrying sign in Korea's investment trend - rapid fall in machinery and equipment investment with slow increase in R&D investment. The challenge facing Korea is how to transform her economy from catching-up model to a knowledge-based one. The paper shows that, in tandem with the structural changes that today's Korean industries are experiencing, industry's innovation system is also changing. Innovation networks are emerging as the result of economy-wise restructuring since the financial crisis of 1997 and, though still not a dominant force, the newly emerging innovation networks will be the main threads of industry's innovation activities in the future. The changes in industrial innovation system would positively contribute in raising the productivity of the Korean economy. The paper contains a case study on Korea's automobile industry in order to highlight some of main characteristics of the structural changes, in addition to a chapter that gives an overview of the evolutionary paths of the Korea's industrial innovation. The paper assesses that changes can be considered as a positive sign of future growth perspective; but there are further challenges to make the Korea's industrial innovation system effective. The list of such challenges includes strengthening upstream sectors of currently leading industries, expanding the innovation base to SME and promoting technological co-operation between domestic firms and foreign firms.

• Journal of the Korean Regional Science Association
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.131-153
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• 1999

Since 1980's there have been two trends that obviously developed in the would -- economics globalization and urban internationalization. China, with is reform and opening-up policy and rapid economic growth, keeps pace with these two trends. The term "International City" has no putative standard or definition. If we make an analogue of urban functional hierarchy in the world with a pyramid, the International Citiesa are the few elites on its top. The highest level international cities can be called "World City" or "Global City". In today's new international division of labor, they are diversified leading cities with control capacity on a world scale, like New York, London, and Tokyo. The secondary international cities are either diversified cities with influence and regulative functions on multinational scale or specialized cities on politics, economics, culture, or other aspects with worldwide impact. Judged by different criteria, there is no city that is qualified as International City with the exception of Hong Kong, which was returned to the P.R. of China in 1997. Nevertheless, Some favorable conditions for the development of the international city still exist in China. This country is already the sixth largest economic entity in the world, and the second largest economic entity in the world, and the second largest one if GNP estimated by ppp. Furthermore its import and export value make up for 40% of its GNP, indicating that China is repidly merging into global economy. In this 1, 2 billion-population country, the difference of economic levels between urban and rural, coastal and inland regions is so big that a few metropolises in the coastal region have the possibilities and potentials to develop into international cities regardless of rather low GNP per capita of the whole country. This article will focus on analysis from several perspectives, such as the proportion of foreign trade values in GDP, the proportion of imports and exports by foreign funded enterprises in total foreign trade value; distribution of the 500 largest foreign-funded enterprises; distribution of the 500 enterprises with largest import and export values; distrigbution of foreign computer and telecom companies with offices in China; the number of outward flights per week and the international tourists; the value of foreign capital used in cities and so on. From this analysis, it is predicted that Chinese international cities will surely emergy from the eastern coastal regions and they must be the core cities of metropolitan interlocking regions that have been formed or in the process of forming. Those international cities will arise from south to north in turn : Hong Kong-Guangzhu, Shanghai, Beijing-Tianjin, and perhaps the last one is Dalian-Shenyang. The other side of this issue is that there is a long way for the coming international cities in China except Hong Kong. At least China and these core cities must continually devote to (1) improve the regional composition of foreign capital sources. (2) improve the composition of export commodities. (3) improve the investment environment (including hard and soft environment) to attract more transnational corporations to settle. (4) deepen the reform of state-owned enterprises and establish Chinese own transnational corporations to enter the world market.ons to enter the world market.

• Korea Real Estate Review
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.39-52
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• 2014

This study examines the degree of global co-movement & spillover effect among the housing price of ten major countries of OECD including Korea, based on the 3 hypothesis. The data used in this study is quarterly house price index of OECD countries from 1975 to 2012. VAR model is used to analyze the co-movement, and Granger causality methodology is used for the analysis of Spillover Effect. It is found that entire period of study is that the global house prices showed the co-movement, but the coefficient was weak. Since 2008 global financial crisis, the co-movement increased significantly and the adjusted R-square of this model increased 78% compared to the entire period (1975-2012). In general, all hypotheses in this study were significant, and the common shock hypothesis were most significant. In case of Korea, the degree of co-movement was weak compared to the other countries and spillover effect was independent since 2008.

• Korea Trade Review
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• v.43 no.4
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• pp.155-175
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• 2018

This study estimates the technical efficiency and total factor productivity(TFP) of and analyzes the relationship between TFP and exports for Korean manufacturing companies from 2000 to 2016. Specially, TFP is decomposed into Technical Change(TC), Technical Efficiency Change (TEC), and Sale Effect(SE), and compared between large and small enterprises. First, in the case of technical efficiency, the Korean economy has been very vulnerable to external shocks, such as the sharp decline following the 2008 financial crisis. The efficiency of the electronics, automobile, and machinery sectors is low and needs to be improved. In addition, the technological efficiency of large enterprises is higher than that of SMEs in most manufacturing sub-sectors except for non-ferrous metals. In the case of TFP, most changes are due to TC, and the effective combination of labor, capital and the effect of scale have little effect, suggesting that improvement of internal structure is urgent. In addition, volatility due to the impact of the financial crisis in 2008 was much larger in SMEs than in large companies, so external economic impacts are more greater for SMEs than large enterprises. The relationship between TFP decomposition factors and exports shows that TC has a positive effect only on exports of SMEs. Therefore, in order to increase exports, in the case of SMEs, R&D support to promote technological development is needed. In the case of large companies, it is necessary to establish differentiated strategies for each export market, competitor company, and item to link efficiency and scale effect of exports.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.175-196
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• 2022

Information and communication and home appliance industries, which were one of South Korea's main industries, are gradually losing their export share as their export competitiveness is weakening. This study objectively analyzed export competitiveness and suggested export-promising countries in order to help South Korea's information communication and home appliance industries improve exports. In this study, network properties, centrality, and structural hole analysis were performed during network analysis to evaluate export competitiveness. In order to select promising export countries, we proposed a new variable that can take into account the characteristics of an already established International Trade Network (ITN), that is, the Global Value Chain (GVC), in addition to the existing economic factors. The conditional log-odds for individual links derived from the Exponential Random Graph Model (ERGM) in the analysis of the cross-border trade network were assumed as a proxy variable that can indicate the export potential. In consideration of the possibility of ERGM linkage, a parametric approach and a non-parametric approach were used to recommend export-promising countries, respectively. In the parametric method, a regression analysis model was developed to predict the export value of the information and communication and home appliance industries in South Korea by additionally considering the link-specific characteristics of the network derived from the ERGM to the existing economic factors. Also, in the non-parametric approach, an abnormality detection algorithm based on the clustering method was used, and a promising export country was proposed as a method of finding outliers that deviate from two peers. According to the research results, the structural characteristic of the export network of the industry was a network with high transferability. Also, according to the centrality analysis result, South Korea's influence on exports was weak compared to its size, and the structural hole analysis result showed that export efficiency was weak. According to the model for recommending promising exporting countries proposed by this study, in parametric analysis, Iran, Ireland, North Macedonia, Angola, and Pakistan were promising exporting countries, and in nonparametric analysis, Qatar, Luxembourg, Ireland, North Macedonia and Pakistan were analyzed as promising exporting countries. There were differences in some countries in the two models. The results of this study revealed that the export competitiveness of South Korea's information and communication and home appliance industries in GVC was not high compared to the size of exports, and thus showed that exports could be further reduced. In addition, this study is meaningful in that it proposed a method to find promising export countries by considering GVC networks with other countries as a way to increase export competitiveness. This study showed that, from a policy point of view, the international trade network of the information communication and home appliance industries has an important mutual relationship, and although transferability is high, it may not be easily expanded to a three-party relationship. In addition, it was confirmed that South Korea's export competitiveness or status was lower than the export size ranking. This paper suggested that in order to improve the low out-degree centrality, it is necessary to increase exports to Italy or Poland, which had significantly higher in-degrees. In addition, we argued that in order to improve the centrality of out-closeness, it is necessary to increase exports to countries with particularly high in-closeness. In particular, it was analyzed that Morocco, UAE, Argentina, Russia, and Canada should pay attention as export countries. This study also provided practical implications for companies expecting to expand exports. The results of this study argue that companies expecting export expansion need to pay attention to countries with a relatively high potential for export expansion compared to the existing export volume by country. In particular, for companies that export daily necessities, countries that should pay attention to the population are presented, and for companies that export high-end or durable products, countries with high GDP, or purchasing power, relatively low exports are presented. Since the process and results of this study can be easily extended and applied to other industries, it is also expected to develop services that utilize the results of this study in the public sector.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.71-103
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• 2009

Considering the expenditure size of public institutions centering on public enterprises, about 28% of Korea's GDP in 2007, public institutions have significant influence on the Korean economy. However, still in the new government, there are voices of criticism about the need of constant reform on public enterprises due to their irresponsible management impeding national competitiveness. Especially, political controversy over appointment of executives such as CEOs of public enterprises has caused the distrust of the people. As one of various reform measures for public enterprises, this study analyzes the effect of internal governance structure of public enterprises on their managerial performance, since, regardless of privatization of public enterprises, improving the governance structure of public enterprises is a matter of great importance. There are only a few prior researches focusing on the governance structure and managerial performance of public enterprises compared to those of private enterprises. Most of prior researches studied the relationship between parachuting employment of CEO and managerial performance, and concluded that parachuting produces negative effect on managerial performance. However, different from the results of such researches, recent studies suggest that there is no relationship between employment type of CEOs and managerial performance in public enterprises. This study is distinguished from prior researches in view of following. First, prior researches focused on the relationship between employment type of public enterprises' CEOs and managerial performance. However, in addition to this, this study analyzes the relationship of internal auditors and managerial performance. Second, unlike prior researches studying the relationship between employment type of public corporations' CEOs and managerial performance with an emphasis on parachuting employment, this study researches impact of employment type as well as expertise of CEOs and internal auditors on managerial performance. Third, prior researchers mainly used non-financial indicators from various samples. However, this study eliminated subjectivity of researchers by analyzing public enterprises designated by the government and their financial statements, which were externally audited and inspected. In this study, regression analysis is applied in analyzing the relationship of independence and expertise of public enterprises' CEOs and internal auditors and managerial performance in the same year. Financial information from 2003 to 2007 of 24 public enterprises, which are designated by the government, and their personnel information from the board of directors are used as samples. Independence of CEOs is identified by dividing CEOs into persons from the same public enterprise and persons from other organization, and independence of internal auditors is determined by classifying them into two groups, people from academic field, economic world, and civic groups, and people from political community, government ministries, and military. Also, expertise of CEOs and internal auditors is divided into business expertise and financial expertise. As control variables, this study applied foundation year, asset size, government subsidies as a proportion to corporate earnings, and dummy variables by year. Analysis showed that there is significantly positive relationship between independence and financial expertise of internal auditors and managerial performance. In addition, although business expertise and financial expertise of CEOs were not statistically significant, they have positive relationship with managerial performance. However, unlike a general idea, independence of CEOs is not statistically significant, but it is negatively related to managerial performance. Contrary to general concerns, it seems that the impact of independence of public enterprises' CEOs on managerial performance has slightly decreased. Instead, it explains that expertise of public enterprises' CEOs and internal auditors plays more important role in managerial performance rather than their independence. Meanwhile, there are limitations in this study as follows. First, in contrast to private enterprises, public enterprises simultaneously pursue publicness and entrepreneurship. However, this study focuses on entrepreneurship, excluding considerations on publicness of public enterprises. Second, public enterprises in this study are limited to those in the central government. Accordingly, it should be carefully considered when the result of this study is applied to public enterprises in local governments. Finally, this study excludes factors related to transparency and democracy issues which are raised in appointment process of executives of public enterprises, as it may cause the issue of subjectivity of researchers.