• Journal of the Economic Geographical Society of Korea
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.129-146
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• 2014

This paper investigates how industrial diversity affects unemployment and employment instability from the perspective of the regional economy. Through this analysis, we examine how the industry-specific policy to promote some industry strategically in most of areas affects the stability of the regional economy. We measure Herfindahl indexes using the 1993-2010 data of 16 regions in Korea, and use panel regression model for empirical analysis. The main results from this empirical analysis are summarized as follows. First, we confirm that the industrial structure of most regions has been changed to the direction of specialization in 1990s and to the direction of diversification in 2000s through analyzing the changes in the values of Herfindahl indexes during the given period. Second, we find from the estimation results of panel regression model that the higher industrial diversity in most of regions is, the lower the unemployment rate is. However, a statistically significant relationship between industrial diversity and employment instability only partially confirmed. Third, there exist high unemployment rate and employment instability in most metropolitan areas, but it is hard to say that this relationship is highly statistically significant. From the results of the empirical analysis, it is likely that the industry-specific policies such as the regional strategic industry development policies unlike policy goals make the unemployment rate to rise and economic instability to increase. From the viewpoint of employment aspects, the strategies to increase industrial diversity would be desirable rather than those to specialize in the industrial structure.