Issues in S&T Human Resources Development in Korea

It is frequently pointed out that the Korean economy, with its scarce natural resources, would never have been able to achieve current levels of economic development without the massive provision of well-educated, hardworking human resources. Throughout the industrialization process ,full-fledged deployment and mobilization of qualified human resources have been the foundation to industrial policy and S&T policy. This paper describes the development of S&T human resources in Korea using various statistics including educational enrollment rates, unemployment rates, the allocation of researchers and R&D expenditures among sectors of performance, educational composition of employment within and across industries, technical human resource shortage rates, relative wage levels of SMEs, and composition of labor force by age-group and gender. While analyzing S&T human resources development, this paper discusses issues such as the mismatched demand and supply of skill and knowledge levels of the highly educated, the unbalanced distribution of S&T human resources between sectors, and the low utilization of the female and aged labor force. This paper suggests that the policy maker applies a hybrid of quantitative and qualitative policies to reduce the mismatches of supply and demand of skill and knowledge levels for each labor market categorized according to supply side.