• Korea journal of population studies
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.58-75
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• 1988

1.Objectives of the Study It is a well known fact that a prompt and reliable data on demographic information is essential in a proper planning and evaluation of any program of national or community level. Especially vital statistics are an important demographic component among demographic information. Realizing the importance of vital statistics, the government has made some efforts for years to improve the vital registration system which has a close relationship with the production of vital statistics. However, it is still observed that there are some limitations in utilizing vital registration data due to considerable amount of vital events which are never registered and registered but not in time or inaccurately, even though vital registration system in Korea has sound legal basis. In this connection, the objectives of the study is as follows :(1) To examine some problems of the vital registration system in various aspects, (2) To make improvement programme of continuous Demographic Survey as a supplementary source of vital statistics, and (3) To find out some alternatives for making it possible to produce and utilize the reliable vital statistics by developing analytical methodologies on that. 2. Current Situation of Vital Registration System All the vital events, i.e. births, deaths, marriages and divorces, are to be registered in time under the Civil Registration Law, Statistics Law and Regulation on Vital Statstics as a duty of people. Some recent tendencies in each of recent registration are summarized as below: (1) The completeness of vital registration .Out of all births which are occurred during a year, around 75% of those compared to the estimates are registered in the year of occurrence. .In case of death registration, the percentage of registration in the year of occurrene has been gradually increased from 86.2% in the year of 1980, but it is still below the level of 90% compared to the estimates. .The percentage of registration for marriages and divorces in the year of occurrence out of total registered numbers was revealed to be 69% and 73% respectively in 1985. (2) Continuous Demographic Survey .It is a kind of sample survey for the purpose of producing reliable vital statistics which could not be provided by the vital registration. .It covers about 17, 000 sample households at national level and important information for vital events are collected in every month by 323 expertized enumerators who are regular staff of the government. .Although the result of the survey seems to be more reliable than of vital registration, the reliability of the data is still bellow the acceptable level if compared with relevant information from other sources such as population census or special surveys. 3. Problems of Vital Registration System There are four major obstacles in improving vital registration system in Korea; (1) In general, policy priority is not given on any programme of improving vital registration system. It is, therefore, very difficult to formulate comprehensive programme through having cooperation from related authorities and sufficient financial assistance. (2) In all the laws related and system itself, there is substantial degree of overlap and irrationality. Registration of each vital event is maintained according to several laws and regulation such as Civil Registration Law, Statistics Law, Resident Registration Law and Regulation on Vital Statistics. However they are mutually overlapped and overall supervision can not be done systematically due to lack of co-operation among the authorities concerned. (3) The administration of vital registration system seems to be working inefficiently, because of most of civil servants who are in charge of vital registration are lacking of conception on vital statistics and also there is a certain extent of regidity in handling the works. Therefore, they are doing their jobs in a passive way. (4) A substantial proportion of vital events occurred is not registered within the legal time limit (i.e. within one month after the occurrence in case of birth and death) or not registered forever. Some of social customs and superstitution seem to be the potential causes especially in case of births and deaths. 4. Recommendations for the Improvement of Vital Statistics (1) Reporting systems such as civil registration, vital statistics and resident registration should be integrated under the single law. Also, administrative supervision, personnel and budget with regard to the registration system should be under the control of a single ministry. (2) It is necessary to simplify the procedures and methods of reporting vital events, i.e., reducing number of sheets of the form, making corrections easily, reducing registration items, etc. (3) Continuous Demographic Survey as a supplementary source of vital registration should be improved and special ad-hoc surveys should be conducted wth regular interval. (4) In-depth analysis should be done using various sources of data on vital statistics. 5. Concluding Remarks From this study, we can notice that temporary campaign and motivation programs are not sufficient to improve the quality of vital statistics. Strong intentions and continuous efforts of the government are needed for the improvement of the vital registration system. Furthermore, most of the data collected through the registration are not properly analyzed and utilized, partly due to the lack of appreciation among high-level governmental officials of the need for vital statistics. It is, therefore, requested that long-term improvement programs of vital statistics be implemented with policy priority and continuous efforts be given to this purpose as a long-term goal of development in Korea.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.151-166
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• 1991

In this paper, a simple game-theoretic entry deterrence model is developed that integrates both limit pricing and predatory pricing. While there have been extensive studies which have dealt with predation and limit pricing separately, no study so far has analyzed these closely related practices in a unified framework. Treating each practice as if it were an independent phenomenon is, of course, an analytical necessity to abstract from complex realities. However, welfare analysis based on such a model may give misleading policy implications. By analyzing limit and predatory pricing within a single framework, this paper attempts to shed some light on the effects of interactions between these two frequently cited tactics of entry deterrence. Another distinctive feature of the paper is that limit and predatory pricing emerge, in equilibrium, as rational, profit maximizing strategies in the model. Until recently, the only conclusion from formal analyses of predatory pricing was that predation is unlikely to take place if every economic agent is assumed to be rational. This conclusion rests upon the argument that predation is costly; that is, it inflicts more losses upon the predator than upon the rival producer, and, therefore, is unlikely to succeed in driving out the rival, who understands that the price cutting, if it ever takes place, must be temporary. Recently several attempts have been made to overcome this modelling difficulty by Kreps and Wilson, Milgram and Roberts, Benoit, Fudenberg and Tirole, and Roberts. With the exception of Roberts, however, these studies, though successful in preserving the rationality of players, still share one serious weakness in that they resort to ad hoc, external constraints in order to generate profit maximizing predation. The present paper uses a highly stylized model of Cournot duopoly and derives the equilibrium predatory strategy without invoking external constraints except the assumption of asymmetrically distributed information. The underlying intuition behind the model can be summarized as follows. Imagine a firm that is considering entry into a monopolist's market but is uncertain about the incumbent firm's cost structure. If the monopolist has low cost, the rival would rather not enter because it would be difficult to compete with an efficient, low-cost firm. If the monopolist has high costs, however, the rival will definitely enter the market because it can make positive profits. In this situation, if the incumbent firm unwittingly produces its monopoly output, the entrant can infer the nature of the monopolist's cost by observing the monopolist's price. Knowing this, the high cost monopolist increases its output level up to what would have been produced by a low cost firm in an effort to conceal its cost condition. This constitutes limit pricing. The same logic applies when there is a rival competitor in the market. Producing a high cost duopoly output is self-revealing and thus to be avoided. Therefore, the firm chooses to produce the low cost duopoly output, consequently inflicting losses to the entrant or rival producer, thus acting in a predatory manner. The policy implications of the analysis are rather mixed. Contrary to the widely accepted hypothesis that predation is, at best, a negative sum game, and thus, a strategy that is unlikely to be played from the outset, this paper concludes that predation can be real occurence by showing that it can arise as an effective profit maximizing strategy. This conclusion alone may imply that the government can play a role in increasing the consumer welfare, say, by banning predation or limit pricing. However, the problem is that it is rather difficult to ascribe any welfare losses to these kinds of entry deterring practices. This difficulty arises from the fact that if the same practices have been adopted by a low cost firm, they could not be called entry-deterring. Moreover, the high cost incumbent in the model is doing exactly what the low cost firm would have done to keep the market to itself. All in all, this paper suggests that a government injunction of limit and predatory pricing should be applied with great care, evaluating each case on its own basis. Hasty generalization may work to the detriment, rather than the enhancement of consumer welfare.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.95-110
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• 2013

Recently, the amount of unstructured data being generated through a variety of social media has been increasing rapidly, resulting in the increasing need to collect, store, search for, analyze, and visualize this data. This kind of data cannot be handled appropriately by using the traditional methodologies usually used for analyzing structured data because of its vast volume and unstructured nature. In this situation, many attempts are being made to analyze unstructured data such as text files and log files through various commercial or noncommercial analytical tools. Among the various contemporary issues dealt with in the literature of unstructured text data analysis, the concepts and techniques of opinion mining have been attracting much attention from pioneer researchers and business practitioners. Opinion mining or sentiment analysis refers to a series of processes that analyze participants' opinions, sentiments, evaluations, attitudes, and emotions about selected products, services, organizations, social issues, and so on. In other words, many attempts based on various opinion mining techniques are being made to resolve complicated issues that could not have otherwise been solved by existing traditional approaches. One of the most representative attempts using the opinion mining technique may be the recent research that proposed an intelligent model for predicting the direction of the stock index. This model works mainly on the basis of opinions extracted from an overwhelming number of economic news repots. News content published on various media is obviously a traditional example of unstructured text data. Every day, a large volume of new content is created, digitalized, and subsequently distributed to us via online or offline channels. Many studies have revealed that we make better decisions on political, economic, and social issues by analyzing news and other related information. In this sense, we expect to predict the fluctuation of stock markets partly by analyzing the relationship between economic news reports and the pattern of stock prices. So far, in the literature on opinion mining, most studies including ours have utilized a sentiment dictionary to elicit sentiment polarity or sentiment value from a large number of documents. A sentiment dictionary consists of pairs of selected words and their sentiment values. Sentiment classifiers refer to the dictionary to formulate the sentiment polarity of words, sentences in a document, and the whole document. However, most traditional approaches have common limitations in that they do not consider the flexibility of sentiment polarity, that is, the sentiment polarity or sentiment value of a word is fixed and cannot be changed in a traditional sentiment dictionary. In the real world, however, the sentiment polarity of a word can vary depending on the time, situation, and purpose of the analysis. It can also be contradictory in nature. The flexibility of sentiment polarity motivated us to conduct this study. In this paper, we have stated that sentiment polarity should be assigned, not merely on the basis of the inherent meaning of a word but on the basis of its ad hoc meaning within a particular context. To implement our idea, we presented an intelligent investment decision-support model based on opinion mining that performs the scrapping and parsing of massive volumes of economic news on the web, tags sentiment words, classifies sentiment polarity of the news, and finally predicts the direction of the next day's stock index. In addition, we applied a domain-specific sentiment dictionary instead of a general purpose one to classify each piece of news as either positive or negative. For the purpose of performance evaluation, we performed intensive experiments and investigated the prediction accuracy of our model. For the experiments to predict the direction of the stock index, we gathered and analyzed 1,072 articles about stock markets published by "M" and "E" media between July 2011 and September 2011.