Narrow Results

This study examines how and why the gap between economic growth and real wage growth in Taiwan is widening, a phenomenon that contrasts sharply with South Korea, which has a similar industrial structure to that of Taiwan. We empirically demonstrate that, despite the continued growth of labor productivity, the benefits from economic growth allocated to workers have been falling, and that this process has accelerated following the 2008–2009 financial crisis. The labor market institutional effect contributed partially to the problem. Workers’ purchasing power, measured by the real consumption wage rate, has been declining for a relatively long period, implying significant deterioration of terms-of-trade, and cutting real wage growth by as much as 2.23% per year. The terms-of-trade effect is particularly prominent in the manufacturing sector, which is highly export-oriented. Moreover, we found cash wages to be very sensitive to the rise in the rate of unemployment, and to the changes in output performance of the industry in which the workers are employed. The latter factor significantly reduced the cash wages paid to workers in the manufacturing sector, which highlighted the waning of workers’ bargaining power regarding wages, as well as the negative impact of globalization on the labor market. We therefore conclude that the deterioration of terms-of-trade, increases in the aggregate unemployment rate, the adverse globalization effect and the institutional effect might be the main driving forces for real wage stagnancy in Taiwan.

Overseas presidential visits are an essential diplomatic activity that support official development aid (ODA) for humanitarian and strategic purposes worldwide. This study examines the effects of such visits on bilateral ODA allocation by focusing on South Korea, which achieved economic development through foreign aid, subsequently becoming a donor country. We find that presidential diplomatic visits abroad increase ODA agreements in visiting countries, confirmed through multiple robustness checks. ODA is increased through several aid delivery channels (concessional loans, public institutions and summit meetings in recipient countries) with heterogeneous effects across regions. Thus, political leaders’ diplomatic visits are crucial to ODA allocation.

This case is set in the period after the worldwide financial crisis that started in mid 2007. Focusing on SK Telecom, one of South Korea's largest telecommunications providers, it reviews the previous strategies implemented by the Korean firm as well as the key challenges that SK Telecom has faced during the period of 2008–2009. This case also reviews the other global strategies undertaken by other major telecommunications companies from other countries. Faced with home market stagnation as well as distressed credit markets, SK Telecom requires a renewed strategy for further growth ahead. The case allows students to examine the threats and opportunities associated with the firm's internal and external environment, review its corporate portfolio, and formulate strategies for future growth of the firm. This case also highlights the different challenging market conditions in various markets and how these conditions affect the viability of SK Telecom seeking growth overseas.

The article describes the market for bioinformatics, its regional attractiveness index and the market segments of bioinformatics. It also talks about bioinformatics in Asia Pacific: Japan, Australia, India, Singapore and South Korea.

NZ Scientists’ Breakthrough in Tracing Ground Beef Product.

South Korea Starts Tracking its Agricultural Goods in 2006.

The BIO 2005 international convention is the largest gathering of the biotech industry in the world. Last year, it was held on June 19-22 inside the behemoth Convention Center in downtown Philadelphia. It brought together 18 730 executives, investors, consultants, lawyers, politicians and scientists from 56 countries. More than 500 media representatives covered the event. Biotechnology research and findings presented by countries in the Asia Pacific region has begun to make a significant impact on these annual BIO gatherings. The achievements of some countries in this region are briefly reviewed.

BIOTRONIK Begins Manufacturing High-Tech Products in Singapore.

First Dengue Vaccine Approved in More than 10 Countries.

Zyrtec^® Tablet for Allergy Relief, Now Available Over-the-Counter as Zyrtec^®-R Tablet.

Covance Receives Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific CRO Growth Excellence Leadership Award Three Years Running.

First Pan-Asian Real-world Study on the Use of Rivaroxaban for Stroke Prevention in Patients with Atrial Fibrillation.

Oxford Spinout to Develop Cancer Therapies which Reprogram Tumours to Die.

Recruitment Begins for Major Clinical Study in Precision Therapy for Liver Cancer Patients.

GE Healthcare opens USD 7.4 million APAC Fast Trak Bioprocessing Technology and Training Center in South Korea.

South Korea launched electricity reform in the 1990s but had continued to struggle with instituting an effective free market. In order to bolster economic growth, the development of the electricity industry has long been a fundamental issue for the state. The case in Korea is distinctive because it is part of a large-scale privatization project as the political regime had just shifted to democracy. The state spun off and corporatized the state-owned power enterprise with very limited privatization. The Korean government has chosen to control the power companies as the largest shareholder. Nonetheless, the reform process was suspended in 2004 without encountering major problems. This has created a major puzzle for analysts: why did the reform result in this outcome? I argue that as a politically driven reform project, power reform in Korea was destined to fail. The economic and social responses elicited by reform implementation all contributed to the failure of the power reform. This paper describes the dynamics of Korea’s electricity reform and details the industrial restructuring during the reform. It examines the political logic of the reform and how it shaped the power industry and in turn led to a stalled agenda. The paper concludes with a discussion of the broader implications for the roles of the state, industrial policy, and state-business relations.

After undergoing a series of mass demonstrations during the past three decades, including the 2016–2017 candlelight protests that led to the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye, many commentators in South Korea are confident that their country has become a land for what Karl Marx called “free men.” Korean citizens are portrayed as being ready to participate in voluntary political associations and collective actions and to pursue their interests in the public sphere. However, the data are showing the opposite to be true: citizen participation in public-sphere activities has substantially decreased since the mid-2000s, while the government has managed to improve or at least maintain its political responsiveness during the same period. Explaining the unnoticed background to this imbalance, this essay sheds light on the myth of the benefactor state in Korean democracy, arguing that this has emerged because neoliberalism has not only placed an increasing number of people in precarious positions but also neutralized them politically. The Korean government has capitalized on this situation to mythicize itself as a benefactor state that possesses an incomparable administrative capacity to take care of precarious people. By investigating the period of Park’s presidency (2013–2017) and the current rule of President Moon Jae-in (2017–), this essay shows how the myth of the benefactor state has emerged and created a unique cycle of Korean democracy.

In the past few decades, post-democratization politics in South Korea have witnessed an upsurge in authoritarian nostalgia, called the “Park Jung-hee syndrome.” This paper examines the origins of public nostalgia for the authoritarian dictator by putting two theoretical arguments, i.e., the socialization thesis and the system output thesis, to an empirical test. This paper utilizes the 2010 Korea Democracy Barometer from the Korea Barometer and the 2010 and the 2015 Korean National Identity Survey from the East Asia Institute. The empirical analysis of the South Korean case strongly supports the political socialization argument, suggesting that citizens’ yearning for Park Jung-hee is not merely an outcome of the negative evaluations of the democratic governments’ performances. Rather, their authoritarian nostalgia is in large part an outcome of their political socialization during the Park dictatorship. The analysis implies that, although a resurgence of the Park Jung-hee syndrome in post-democratization South Korea is not expected to derail the country’s route to democratic deepening, it may continue to be a main source of political division in partisan and electoral politics in the future.

“Middle powers,” variously defined, have served relevant and significant roles in the post-WWII regional and global orders, facilitated by structural conditions of “long peace” among great powers and proactive leadership by and among creative middle powers. Within the complex Asia-Pacific security order, “middle powers” such as Australia, Canada, and South Korea have had the “space” to engage the non-like minded and advance multilateralism with security guarantees from the US. However, Beijing and Washington today are eliminating this space and its associated choices for middle-power diplomacy by increasingly characterizing their rivalry as a confrontation of “existential threats” between incompatible “civilizations” and securitizing trade and technology. China and the US are each selectively ignoring or purposely eroding key aspects of a rules-based international order. This paper highlights the dilemmas of South Korea, Australia, and Canada, middle powers who have found themselves individually and collectively “stuck” facing contradictory global and regional policy choices.

The idea that a change of government can alter the foreign policy orientation of a state is nothing new in international relations. This paper presents a preliminary investigation into the causal linkages between domestic political regime changes and foreign policy restructuring in Malaysia and South Korea. It assumes that regime changes allow for a greater propensity for the recalibration of foreign policy interests. Since the effectiveness of any bilateral cooperation depends on successful formulation and implementation, this paper dissects the transition, convergence and challenges in bilateral cooperation between the two countries. Both Mahathir Mohamad and Moon Jae-in saw a necessity to diversify economic partners that had resulted from the policies of previous administrations. While the basic elements of their foreign policy remained the same, both Malaysia and South Korea reevaluated their policies with regard to the international issues affecting their domestic interests. While relations had once been transactional at best, the convergence of the Look East Policy (LEP) 2.0 and the New Southern Policy (NSP) advanced bilateral relations for 22 months until the collapse of Mahathir’s government in 2020.

This study aims to examine South Korean middle power diplomacy discourses using premodern Korea’s diplomatic thinking-cum-practice of sadae (serving the great) as a heuristic device. It is argued that current discourses of South Korea as a middle power resonate with sadae because they strive to secure the existing liberal international order led by the West and the United States. It also argues that it is both necessary and healthy for South Korean middle power diplomacy studies to denaturalize its self-evident faith in the existing liberal international order—a not universal but particular order among several possible others in history—with South Korea celebrating and appropriating liberal values. This would prepare South Korean middle power diplomacy research to tackle uncertainty, difference, and pluralism in global politics while producing more responsible and responsive scholarship in international relations.

The external circumstances for universities have been changing rapidly. In order to be competitive, survive and flourish, universities have turned to external sources to generate revenues. The literature refers to this phenomenon as academic capitalism, defined as the involvement of colleges and their faculty in market-like behaviours, which has become a key feature of higher education finances in most countries. As a result, technology transfer, technological commercialisation, and patents via industry–university collaboration represent a source of financial rewards. This paper explores the determinants of financial rewards of universities sourced from academic engagement through industry–university collaboration in South Korea. We have found that technology transfer per employees working at technology licensing offices, participation of engineering faculty, patent approvals, and the number of firms with incubators within universities significantly contributes to university revenues. The following determinants of financial performance are unexpectedly not contributors to revenue: technological commercialisation using technology transfer, distinguished faculty and incentive rules for inventors. In the light of these findings, it appears that an entrepreneurial university program is likely to play a strong role in university finances in Korea.

Despite the large and growing role of exports in Korea’s carbon emissions, they have been largely overlooked in Korea’s carbon neutrality strategy. With this in mind, we analyze Korea’s aggregate emission intensity of exports (AEI_E), an indicator of the environmental efficiency of exports, which decreased from 1.37Kt/$M to 0.74Kt/$M during 2000–2014. Using the multi-regional input-output model and two-stage multiplicative structural decomposition analysis (MSDA), we uncover drivers of changes in the AEI_E. Analysis of bilateral AEI_E shows that exports to developed countries had a large impact on the decline while exports to developing countries have risen in importance. MSDA shows that the carbon intensity effect contributed most to the decline but that trade in intermediate goods and trade in final goods were also important. At the sectoral level, manufacturers of basic metals, electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning supply and transportation sectors were shown to be important drivers of the decline in the AEI_E. As the first study to analyze the drivers of Korea’s AEI_E, this paper suggests various abatement policies to help achieve the goal of carbon neutrality by 2050.

Floods are major social and environmental concerns in many urban areas. We investigated how changes in land cover, sociodemographic conditions, and meteorological factors affect flood damage in districts of South Korea. Using historical maps and spatial analysis, we showed that flood damages increased in the areas where rapid urbanization happened without coordinated urban planning. High flood damage areas are not spatially randomly distributed, and the hotspots of high damage areas are concentrated in population centers that underwent rapid development after 1975. Additionally, human modifications of natural channels further exacerbated flood risks during the development stage and subsequent periods. Total annual precipitation is positively related to the flood damage at a higher spatial unit. This study underscores the importance of understanding the historical–geographical conditions, and how humans either increased or reduced the flood damage through social and infrastructure interventions. Findings of this study have implications for resilient flood management for regions that are currently facing the dual challenges of land densification and climate change-induced heavy precipitation.

The study’s key aim is to decide what South Korean initial public offering (IPO) issuers indicate as their intended usage of IPO proceeds, as well as the use with the highest amount of allocation, and whether the allocation of IPO proceeds to each intended use varies across industries. In order to fulfil the study’s target, a manual material review of prospectuses from 235 IPO issuers was conducted between 2005 and 2015. Descriptive statistics, one-way analysis of variance, Independent Sample $t$-test, and Wilcoxon Rank Sum Test were used to evaluate the results. The findings reveal that issuers plan to use IPO proceeds for a range of purposes. Capital investment, on the other hand, earned the largest volume and proportion of IPO proceeds, followed by debt restructuring and company growth. The trend of allocation of IPO proceeds for a particular purpose is affected by the industry classifications of issuers, according to further research using the Independent Sample $t$-test and Wilcoxon Rank Sum Test, since there is a statistically relevant discrepancy between the mean values of allocation of IPO proceeds across industries. The technology sector, for example, has a statistically higher mean research and development (R&D) score than other sectors. As a result, future research into how the expected usage of IPO proceeds impacts subsequent IPO results will be important.

This paper analyzes the dynamics of supply chain diversification in a contested East Asia and their implications for India–South Korea cooperation in the post-COVID-19 era. Major powers have sought to restructure supply chain by designing a strategy to reduce their reliance on China-controlled supply chain. The United States–China trade and technological war, Asian regional powers’ escalating conflicts with a rising China, and pandemic-induced supply chain disruptions have played key roles in driving the restructuring process. India and South Korea, Asia’s two major economies, have also re-evaluated their supply chain strategies. As this paper explains, on the one hand, India has been striving to emerge as a supply chain hub for key industries by ending China’s control. On the other hand, South Korea has also been aiming to diversify its supply chain beyond China under the New Southern Policy. Against that backdrop, critical developments concerning supply chain cooperation have occurred between the two countries amid the COVID-19 crisis. The pandemic has not only facilitated the opening of high-level political exchanges on supply chain but also brought tangible outcomes, as Korean companies have become active participants in India’s quest to build an India-centric supply chain. I conclude this study by contending that the two countries are “natural partners” in reshaping the supply chain dynamics in East Asia in the post-COVID-19 era.

Since the establishment of diplomatic relations between South Korea (hereafter referred to as Korea) and India in 1973, their bilateral relationship has made significant progress. This year marks the 50th anniversary of their diplomatic partnership, which calls for a scholarly examination of the developments in Korea-India relations over the last five decades, and their future prospects. This special issue’s introductory paper provides a concise overview of the evolution of Korea–India relationships and introduces the other papers in the issue, emphasizing their significance in understanding the trajectory of the relationships. The primary goal of this introductory paper is to make two contributions: First, it aims to enrich the existing literature on India–Korea relations; and second, it provides key insights for policymakers to strengthen India–Korea ties in a new global order.

Great attention has been paid to the bilateral economic relations between India, Vietnam, and South Korea; however, only scant research has focused on the prospects of triangular economic cooperation among the three countries. Given the advantage and demand for the cooperation of each party, there is significant potential for trilateral economic cooperation among South Korea, Vietnam, and India. In this paper, we discover the prospects for their triangular economic cooperation in three aspects. First, this study examines the potential for cooperation in production networks and supply chains between the three countries in the context of reconfiguring the global value chains (GVCs), with a focus on the leading role of South Korean multinational enterprises (MNEs). Second, the study explores trilateral cooperation in the digital economy and connectivity, focusing on how South Korea and India can collaborate on investment projects in Vietnam. Third, this study discusses the rationale and possibility of forming a regional trade agreement (RTA) between the three countries. South Korea, Vietnam, and India have extant bilateral trade agreements between two of the three countries; however, there is no regional integration among the three countries discussed in specific. Considering the bilateral relations and domestic and external factors, the paper reckons that an RTA for starters between the three countries would be mutually beneficial to each of the corresponding economies.