A Study on the Periodic Characteristics and the Structural Change in Korean Fisheries

우리나라 수산업의 시기별 특징과 구조변화에 관한 연구

The fisheries industry has been changed drastically during the so - called Golden Growth Era of Korea. Recently, WTO/DDA agenda drove industries out of their safe refuges toward infinite competitions in the world. This paper aims at finding out distinguished features in the structural changes of fisheries since 70s. Furthermore, policy implications are investigated in order for the fisheries to survive in the outdoors. The paper consists of the following sections. First, we consider why and for what the structural change of fisheries in historical perspective should be investigated. And we introduce how we can approach to the goal in various aspects in the second section. In the third section, we examine the historical change of Korean fisheries in respect of national economy, resource allocation mechanism, industrial structure, and fisheries society. In the fourth section, we extract the development steps in fisheries from the periodic characteristics, using various methods of the above approaches. And we deduce the next step for Korean fisheries in the future. Finally, we conclude that there needs some turning point of fisheries policies in Korea, striving to foster the fisheries industry in the future. As results of empirical analysis in this paper, we find that fisheries industry in Korea has experienced some momentous changes during 30 years, using I/O data of B.O.K. The weight of fisheries sector in the whole economy of Korea increased during early 70s, initially leading the national economy to export - oriented engine for growth. But fisheries sector has shrunk rapidly since late 70s. Almost resources in Korea were allocated to expanding manufacturing industries. Further, fisheries industry has encountered perfect international competitions since the late 90s. This paper draws that fisheries industry in Korea will jump across to next step of qualitative growth in the future. Therefore, we recommend that the policies should be focused on enhancing the industrial competitiveness, switching quantitative growth to qualitative advance in fisheries.