• Journal of the Economic Geographical Society of Korea
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.293-302
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• 2002

China in the era of economic transition has conducted the housing reform policy over the past 20 years. Housing providing systems have changed from the free distributing housing system under the governmental planning to the monetary housing system for individual customers. The 1998 monetary housing distribution policy, which ended the 20-year Chinese housing reform, departed from the direct distribution system that had blocked housing commodification. The purpose of the housing reform was to provide and reproduce housing without the expenses of the Chinese government and work unit (danwei), which is different from Russia. In order to achieve the housing reform, the Chinese government introduced various policies, which enabled residents to purchase housing by themselves. However, it took long for residents, who had taken government's welfare system granted, to accept housing as goods. In addition, the Chinese government's efforts to reproduce housing by market systems failed because housing was closely linked to land and was expensive consumption goods, which differentiates housing from other goods that can be commodified through market prices and diverse ownerships. Accordingly, despite a political burden, the Chinese government waived the real distribution policy for housing. After the waiver, the housing commodification process excelled through the private housing markets.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.169-206
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• 2009

This study stems from a question, "How should we understand the pattern of the Korean economy after the 1990s?" Among various analytic methods applicable, this study chooses a Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) with long-run restrictions, identifies diverse impacts that gave rise to the current status of the Korean economy, and differentiates relative contributions of those impacts. To that end, SVAR is applied to four economic models; Blanchard and Quah (1989)'s 2-variable model, its 3-variable extensions, and the two other New Keynesian type linear models modified from Stock and Watson (2002). Especially, the latter two models are devised to reflect the recent transitions in the determination of foreign exchange rate (from a fixed rate regime to a flexible rate one) as well as the monetary policy rule (from aggregate targeting to inflation targeting). When organizing the assumed results in the form of impulse response and forecasting error variance decomposition, two common denominators are found as follows. First, changes in the rate of economic growth are mainly attributable to the impact on productivity, and such trend has grown strong since the 2000s, which indicates that Korea's economic growth since the 2000s has been closely associated with its potential growth rate. Second, the magnitude or consistency of impact responses tends to have subsided since the 2000s. Given Korea's high dependence on trade, it is possible that low interest rates, low inflation, steady growth, and the economic emergence of China as a world player have helped secure capital and demand for export and import, which therefore might reduced the impact of each sector on overall economic status. Despite the fact that a diverse mixture of models and impacts has been used for analysis, always two common findings are observed in the result. Therefore, it can be concluded that the decreased rate of economic growth of Korea since 2000 appears to be on the same track as the decrease in Korea's potential growth rate. The contents of this paper are constructed as follows: The second section observes the recent trend of the economic development of Korea and related Korean articles, which might help in clearly defining the scope and analytic methodology of this study. The third section provides an analysis model to be used in this study, which is Structural VAR as mentioned above. Variables used, estimation equations, and identification conditions of impacts are explained. The fourth section reports estimation results derived by the previously introduced model, and the fifth section concludes.

• The Southeast Asian review
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.163-191
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• 2017

This article aims to review the recent, especially focusing on the year of 2016, situations and prospects of the Vietnamese politics, economy, and international relations. Politically, Vietnam completed the election of members for the National Assembly and organized new leadership at the 12th National Congress of the Vietnamese Communist Party in 2016. One characteristic of the new leadership is that the politicians, especially the members of politburo, from the North continue to occupy the position of majority. The other one is that the new leadership promised to carry out the restructuring of economy toward industries producing higher value-added commodities even though Vietnam industries admittedly need to accelerate present industrialization and modernization as a developing country under the seemingly contradictory slogan of "the development of market economy for socialism." The declared goals of the new leadership in Vietnam are inevitable in a sense since the development of Vietnamese economy has been heavily dependent upon Foreign Direct Investment(FDI) taking advantage of Vietnamese cheap labor and simultaneously it is evident that its future is unsecure if it maintains status quo. In fact, the Vietnamese economy has impressively showed high growth rate by the help of foreign capitals since 1990s despite the repetitive recessions of global economy but its growth is not likely to be sustainable anymore if it will not reduce foreign dependency and social economic inequality in a long term. In a short run, global economic recession, the financial and monetary policies of global powers, and recent protectionism and uncertainty of trade agreements will be three crucial variables to affect Vietnamese economy. In terms of international relations, Vietnam is continuously expected to practise the policy of checks and balances among the powerful countries. Vietnam has seriously disputed with China on islands sovereignty in the South China Sea and attempted to maintain close relationship with other powerful countries including especially America. However, mainly due to the new protectionism by the regime of American president Donald Trump, the Vietnamese government also need to keep close relationship with China increasingly for both economic and diplomatic security. Under the circumstances, Vietnam is expected to maintain more practical and balanced international relations.