• Korea Trade Review
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.51-65
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• 2020

According to an analysis of 560 foreign-invested companies investing in South Korea's manufacturing industry, the following three facts were found. First, the proportion of sales by manufacturing foreign-invested companies is divided into 68.5 percent of domestic sales and 31.5 percent of exports. From 68.5 percent of domestic sales, sales to Korean companies are 60.5 percent, including 37.1 percent for large companies and 23.4 percent for small and medium-sized companies, while only 8.0 percent for domestic consumers. Second, the investment sectors of manufacturing foreign-invested enterprises are 'machine and equipment manufacturing', 'chemical and chemical-chemical material manufacturing-excluding pharmaceuticals', 'electronic components, computers, video, sound and communication equipment manufacturing' and 'vehicle and trailer manufacturing'. It overlaps with electric·electronics, petro-chemicals and automobiles, which are Korea's main industries and areas of Korean global companies. Third, 31.5 percent of the sales of foreign-invested companies in the manufacturing sector are exported. Foreign-invested companies export their products to use them for their parents or affiliates or to the third countries. The analysis shows that foreign-invested companies invested in Korea for B2B transactions with Korean companies. The implications are that Korea can attract foreign investments by utilizing Korean companies' demand for intermediate goods. Foreign-invested companies can invest in Korea in order to use Korea, which has signed free trade agreements with the US, the EU and ASEAN, as an export platform.

• Journal of Arbitration Studies
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.91-120
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• 2020

The Scope of Application of North Korea's Foreign Economic Arbitration Act and Foreign Investment Act This article examines whether the Foreign Economic Arbitration Act and the Foreign Investment Act of North Korea apply to South Korean parties or companies. This article analyzes laws and agreements related to economic cooperation between South Korea and North Korea. Furthermore, this article compares and evaluates laws related to foreign investment and enacted in North Korea. Now, North Korea's door is closed due to economic sanctions against it, but it will be opened soon. Thus, this article prepares for the future opening of North Korea's markets. Is there a rule of laws in North Korea or just a ruler? Are there laws in North Korea? North Korea has enacted a number of legislation to attract foreign investors, referring to those Chinese laws. For example, North Korea enacted the Foreigner Investment Act, the Foreigner Company Act, the Foreign Investment Bank Act, the Foreign Economic Arbitration Act, the Foreign Economic Contract Act, the International Trade Act, and the Free Economy and Trade Zone Act, among others. Article 2 (2) of the Foreign Investment Law of North Korea states, "Foreign investors are corporations and individuals from other countries investing in our country." It is interpreted that South Korea is not included in the "other countries" of this definition. According to many mutual agreements signed by South Korea and North Korea, the relationship between the two Koreas is a special relation inside the Korean ethnic group. An arbitration between a South Korean party and a North Korean party has the characteristics of both domestic arbitrations and international arbitrations. If the South Korea and North Korea Commercial Arbitration Commission or the Kaesong Industrial Complex Arbitration Commission is not established, the possibility of arbitration by the Chosun International Trade Arbitration Commission, established under North Korea's Foreign Economic Arbitration Act, should be examined. There have been no cases where the Foreign Economic Arbitration Act is applied to disputes between parties of South Korea and North Korea. It might be possible to apply the Foreign Economic Arbitration Act by recognizing the "foreign factor" of a dispute between the South Korean party and North Korean party. It is necessary to raise legislative clarifications by revising the North Korea's Foreign Economic Arbitration Act as to whether Korean parties or companies are included in the scope of this Act's application. Even if it is interpreted that South Korean parties or companies are not included in the scope of North Korea's Foreign Economic Arbitration Act, disputes between South Korean companies and North Korean companies can be resolved by foreign arbitration institutes such as CIETAC in China, HKIAC in Hong Kong, or SIAC in Singapore. Such arbitration awards could be enforced in North Korea pursuant to Article 64 of North Korea's Foreign Economic Arbitration Act. This is because the arbitration awards of foreign arbitration institutes are included in the scope of North Korea's Foreign Economic Arbitration Act. The matter is how to enforce the North Korean laws when a North Korean party or North Korean government does not abide by the laws or their contracts. It is essential for North Korea to join the New York Convention (Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards) and the ICSID Convention (Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes Between States and Nationals of Other States).

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.7 no.12
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• pp.409-422
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• 2020

In the global trend toward economic integration, Vietnamese enterprises desire to attract investment and increase competitiveness in the global market, so they have been required to provide transparent, high-quality financial reports following the International Financial Reports Standards (IFRS). Based on the roadmap drawn by the Vietnam Ministry of Finance, the foreign-invested enterprises, listed enterprises and state-owned enterprises will be applying IFRS in 2030. However, some enterprises in Vietnam have applied IFRS in the presentation of financial statements at the request of related parties for a while. The main research objective of this paper focused on examining the factors affecting the implementation of IFRS in Vietnamese enterprises through descriptive statistics tools, Cronbach's Alpha testing, EFA and logistics regression analysis with the sample collected from 254 Vietnamese enterprises. The methodology in this research was the mixed qualitative and quantitative method. The results show that the higher the profitability, debt ratio and firm size of the enterprise, the more likely it is to apply IFRS. From the results of this study, the appropriate recommendations have been made to promote the implementation of IFRS by Vietnamese enterprises effectively and following the IFRS application roadmap of the Ministry of Finance of Vietnam.

• Journal of Navigation and Port Research
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• v.44 no.5
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• pp.430-437
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• 2020

This paper analyzes the profitability of the Private Finance Initiative(PFI) ports and proposes the application plans of the R-project(Rehabilitate project) for old ports to attract and activate private investment in the port industry. The R-project of old ports can reduce the government's financial budget and provide improved facilities for users more quickly than the public sector comparator. Before suggesting the R-project for old ports, the profitability of the currently operating 11 companies of the PFI ports are analyzed using the four ratios of profitability, and the results show that all the companies indicate low profitability, except for the top three companies. To apply the R-project, the three types of R-project ports are categorized as maintaining the function of the port, changing the function of the port, and mixing the function of the port. Additionally, three obstacles and improvement measures are suggested; attracting private business, legal issues, and administrative procedures. This study is conducive to the policy making for the port renewal and the activating PFI for the port industry.

• Management Science and Financial Engineering
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.25-41
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• 2004

There have been many studies to build a model that can help investors construct optimal portfolio. Most of the previous models, however, are based upon the path-breaking Markowitz model (1959) which is a quantitative model. One of the most important problems with that kind of quantitative model is that, in reality, most of the investors use not only quantitative, but also qualitative information when they select their optimal portfolio. Since collecting both types of information from the markets are time consuming and expensive, making a set of target assets smaller, without suffering heavy loss in the rate of return, would attract investors. To extract only desired assets among all available assets, we need knowledge that identifies investors' preference for the risk of the assets. This study suggests two-layer decision-making rules capable of identifying an investor's risk preference and an architecture applying them to a quantitative portfolio model based on risk and expected return. Our knowledge-based portfolio system is to build an investor's preference-oriented portfolio. The empirical tests using the data from Korean capital markets show the results that our model contributes significantly to the construction of a better portfolio in the perspective of an investor's benefit/cost ratio than that produced by the existing portfolio models.

• Proceedings of the Korea Port Economic Association Conference
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• 2007.07a
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• pp.493-514
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• 2007

A Port is, one of the important infrastructures, the terminal to connect between land and sea and exerts influences on the development of nation and local area. Accordingly government and privates are making an investment in port facilities in order to raise its competitive power. Due to the economic growth of China and the geographic advantage that Gunsan and Janghang port are close to China, recently traffic with China is rapidly increasing and the role of Gunsan & Janghang ports as a gateway port of west costbecame more important. There, however, remains that Gunsan and Janhang port still don't equipped with enough facilities and strategies to handle increasing traffic. The purpose of this paper is to analyze O/D data of Gunsan-Janghang Port and present the result of O/D as preliminary data. O/D data of Gunsan and Janghang had been analyzed by kinds of cargoes and from/to China's ports and this paper suggests to the competitive strategies of Gunsan and Janghang port to attract cargoes from/to China particularly.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.7 no.9
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• pp.229-239
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• 2020

This paper examines the impact of gender on access to debt finance among Vietnamese enterprises. The paper investigates data and variables retrieved from the World Bank Enterprise Survey dataset using five Probit models. The regression results suggest that there exist more unfavourable debt financing conditions for women-led firms (WLF), measured as a lower probability of having loan applications fully approved. Firm's age, working sector, and perception of access to finance as a difficulty are found to have explanatory power on the discrimination. More importantly, the perception of debt finance as a difficulty or firms' level of confidence significantly explains the variance of the dependent variable of probability of loan approval, or gender effect would be more pronounced if the firm already has a low level of confidence. The paper also contributes in testing for the gender effect on Vietnamese enterprises from different sectors and scale, unlike other prior research papers focusing on specific sectors and/or small and medium enterprises only. The findings are highly useful for Vietnamese credit institutions to set out a specific business policy to attract more WLFs and help promoting gender equality in the working environment, especially in debt financing, which is often neglected in existing regulation and policy frameworks.

• Journal of the Korean Professional Engineers Association
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• v.42 no.2
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• pp.54-60
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• 2009

On January of this year, the 29th National Science and Technology Council, presided by President M.B. Lee, officially finalized a contract for a big project to build an International Science and Business Belt(ISBB) that includes the establishment of a new institute, the Asian Basic Science Institute (ABSI) and the construction of a Rare Isotope Accelerator. The government will inject more than 3.5 trillion Wan into the ISBB project. The investment to build the care laboratory for the project, the heavy ion accelerator, the first one in Korea, will be 460 billion Wan, Korea thus aiming to build an accelerator with world-class performance. This will be the sixth in the world. The construction will start from 2012, and is planned to finish by 2015. ABSI, whose construction will be finished by 2012, is planned to be a care laboratory with 3,000 scientists and staff. To. attract world class researchers and other professionals from aver the world, the project includes the creation of a new city with a superb educational, cultural environment, and comfortable living environment for an international community. The site for this new science and business city, "scientific ecosystem", has not been officially decided yet, and supposed to be announced in the first half af this year.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.7 no.11
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• pp.147-156
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• 2020

This study aims to analyze the effect of public spending, macroeconomic variables, and BPK opinion on economic growth. This study is motivated by the inequality of fiscal policy effectiveness between regions in Indonesia in influencing the economic growth of different regions, the ability of local governments to attract foreign investors, and the transparency of regional financial management in designing development programs to encourage regional economic growth. The analytical tool in this study is a dynamic panel regression model with data from 2008 to 2017. The results of this study show that, in the short term, the population affects regional economic growth, while in the long term, the economic growth is affected by the number of people, the poor, General Allocation Fund, health budget, foreign investment and BPK opinion. The findings of this study are that in the long term the General Allocation Fund becomes an obstacle to economic growth, this is because the general allocation funds is widely used to cover the lack of funds for routine regional activities, thereby reducing activities for development programs. Another research finding is that fiscal policies carried out by local governments make a small and ineffective contribution to promoting economic growth.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.7 no.10
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• pp.629-639
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• 2020

The current study explains how corruption, terrorism, political stability and oil price has an effect on on the Iraq stock exchange utilizing corruption perception index as a proxy of corruption, global terrorism index as proxy for terrorism, political stability and oil price with ISX60 index as proxy of stock market for the period (2005-2019) using Ordinary Least Square method. The results show that the level of corruption, terrorism activities and political stability coefficient is significantly positive with Iraq stock exchange. In contrast, the oil price coefficient is significantly negative with Iraq stock exchange, which means that lower levels of corruption, less terrorism activities and more stability in political system have strong influence on stock market development in Iraq. The study concludes that the explanatory variables are important for Iraq stock exchange. Hence, the study suggests the policy makers to develop stock market by implementing policies and strategies to overcome high level of corruption, terrorism activities especially after ISIS/ISIL announcement has been made public. There is a need for transparency and creating stable political environment through good governance practices in order to attract more foreign investment and promote economic development. Factors like terrorism and corruption make economic and political systems unstable and has an adverse effect on on Iraq's stock exchange performance.