• Journal of the Korean Home Economics Association
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.133-148
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• 1989

This study attempts of analyze empirically the living status of the elderly in Korea by finding out the problems of it in the family and by clarifying the influences of the family environmental variables and the values on the adjustment of the aged. To carryout the aim of this study, the causes and the patterns of the problems for the aged had been found out through the review of literature. Based on them the questionnaire was prepared including the questions of the values, family environmental vriables as well as the degree of satisfaction of thier liver and the extent of life interchange. The former variables were taken as independent and the latter were taken as dependent variables, so that the relationship between the two variables could be exemplified. The 400 aged over 60 living in Seoul and the other cities were selected through the purposive sampling and interviewed. The answers of the 376 respondents, 94% of the sample, were analyzed for this study. The following results have been found out through the various statistical analysis such as frequency distribution, chi-square test, pearson's correlation, analysis of variance and cluster analysis. At first, the results from the examination of the frequency distribution regarding the living status of the aged are; I) sixteen percent of the respondents living with their married offspring were receiving economical support, though they pointed out the problems of the extended family are the inconveniences with their children (60%) and simpleness (20%) of their livers. It seems that the aged in Korea are poor and have negative opinion on the relationship with their offspring even if they live in the same house. Secondly, it has been found out that the family environmental variables, especially such as sex, occupation, residence, education, level, living ability and the family type, play and important role not only on the degree of satisfaction of their liver but also on the extent of interchange of their lives. However, the variables such as religion and whether the spouse is alive or not do not play and important role. Thirdly, the reported main reasons of their delightness were healthy life (1.87%), the well-being of their offspring (2.08%), the spouse's long life (3.38%), religious activity (5.05%), the hobby activity (4.31%) and the participation in the social activity (5.05%). While, they mainly concern about the illness (1.98%), offspring (2.00%), econmic difficulties (3.39%), inharmonious home (3.81%) and the despicable treatment (3.81%). The respondents wer classified into two groups, they are dependent and independent, using cluster analysis. Health, social activity, offspiring, religion, couple's long life among the factors which lead them to be delighted were turned out to be statistically signhificant at 0.01 significance level between the two groups. As far as their worrisome matters are concerned, health and economic difficulties were significantly different between the two groups. Fourthly, regarding the life interchange, it has been proved that there is a statistically significant differences betwwen the two groups in the economic and the emotional satisfaction, help for ordinary life, status in the family, subjective and objective relationship with offspring, but not in economic dependency and the activity status. Fifthly, it has been noted that there is a high correlation between the degree of life's satisfaction and the extent of life interchange. On the basis of the results mentioned above, it could be concluded taht; i) The majority of the aged in Korea are not economically active, and thus they live with their married offspring even of they have a negative opinion on the subjective relationship with them. This can be pointed out as the main problem of the aged and thus it needs to be studied further. ii) the environmental variables such as age, sex education level, family type and occuption (which can not be changed by their effrot) turned out to give an important effect on the extent of the life interchange among the aged. iii) The respondents who are identified as independent group have a higher degree of life satisfaction and family status than the group identified as defendent. Thus, it can be inferred that it is possible for them to adjust their life by making an effort to modify themselves. iv) The high correlation between the extent of life interchange and the degree of life satisfaction indicates that the elderly themselves can adjust in order to obtain the higher degree of life satisfaction. Therefore, the following suggestions are derived from this study. First of all, the aged should try to be psychologically independent. Second, they need to control themselves in order to achieve self-assurance. Third, the community have to prepare a program of self-development for the aged. Fourth, the social welfare policy that can solve the problem of illness and poverty of the elderly should be introduced, so that their minimum requirements can be satisfied.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.71-88
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• 2017

Language models were originally developed for speech recognition and language processing. Using a set of example sentences, a language model predicts the next word or character based on sequential input data. N-gram models have been widely used but this model cannot model the correlation between the input units efficiently since it is a probabilistic model which are based on the frequency of each unit in the training set. Recently, as the deep learning algorithm has been developed, a recurrent neural network (RNN) model and a long short-term memory (LSTM) model have been widely used for the neural language model (Ahn, 2016; Kim et al., 2016; Lee et al., 2016). These models can reflect dependency between the objects that are entered sequentially into the model (Gers and Schmidhuber, 2001; Mikolov et al., 2010; Sundermeyer et al., 2012). In order to learning the neural language model, texts need to be decomposed into words or morphemes. Since, however, a training set of sentences includes a huge number of words or morphemes in general, the size of dictionary is very large and so it increases model complexity. In addition, word-level or morpheme-level models are able to generate vocabularies only which are contained in the training set. Furthermore, with highly morphological languages such as Turkish, Hungarian, Russian, Finnish or Korean, morpheme analyzers have more chance to cause errors in decomposition process (Lankinen et al., 2016). Therefore, this paper proposes a phoneme-level language model for Korean language based on LSTM models. A phoneme such as a vowel or a consonant is the smallest unit that comprises Korean texts. We construct the language model using three or four LSTM layers. Each model was trained using Stochastic Gradient Algorithm and more advanced optimization algorithms such as Adagrad, RMSprop, Adadelta, Adam, Adamax, and Nadam. Simulation study was done with Old Testament texts using a deep learning package Keras based the Theano. After pre-processing the texts, the dataset included 74 of unique characters including vowels, consonants, and punctuation marks. Then we constructed an input vector with 20 consecutive characters and an output with a following 21st character. Finally, total 1,023,411 sets of input-output vectors were included in the dataset and we divided them into training, validation, testsets with proportion 70:15:15. All the simulation were conducted on a system equipped with an Intel Xeon CPU (16 cores) and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 GPU. We compared the loss function evaluated for the validation set, the perplexity evaluated for the test set, and the time to be taken for training each model. As a result, all the optimization algorithms but the stochastic gradient algorithm showed similar validation loss and perplexity, which are clearly superior to those of the stochastic gradient algorithm. The stochastic gradient algorithm took the longest time to be trained for both 3- and 4-LSTM models. On average, the 4-LSTM layer model took 69% longer training time than the 3-LSTM layer model. However, the validation loss and perplexity were not improved significantly or became even worse for specific conditions. On the other hand, when comparing the automatically generated sentences, the 4-LSTM layer model tended to generate the sentences which are closer to the natural language than the 3-LSTM model. Although there were slight differences in the completeness of the generated sentences between the models, the sentence generation performance was quite satisfactory in any simulation conditions: they generated only legitimate Korean letters and the use of postposition and the conjugation of verbs were almost perfect in the sense of grammar. The results of this study are expected to be widely used for the processing of Korean language in the field of language processing and speech recognition, which are the basis of artificial intelligence systems.

• Clinical and Experimental Pediatrics
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• v.51 no.3
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• pp.293-298
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• 2008

Purpose : The aim of our study was to evaluate the therapeutic response to cyclosporine, time to remission and side effects in steroid resistant nephrotic syndrome (SRNS). Methods : This study included 22 children with idiopathic SRNS who were treated with cyclosporine between June 1989 and August 2006. Medical records were reviewed retrospectively. Results : The mean age of patients at diagnosis was $5.2{\pm}3.3\;years$. The male to female ratio was 1.2:1. Pre-treatment renal biopsies showed minimal change (MCD) in 12 (54.5%), focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS) in 8 (36.4%), membranous nephropathy (MGN) in one (4.5%) and mesangioproliferative glomerulonephritis in one (4.5%). 15 (68.2%) patients responded to cyclosporine, of whom 11 (91.6%) patients were MCD, 3 (37.5%) patients FSGS, and 1 patient MGN (MCD vs FSGS, P<0.05). The time to remission in patients who responded to cyclosporine was $31.5{\pm}15.2\;days$. Four of the 15 cyclosporine responders maintained complete remission even after cessation of the medication Seven still received cyclosporine, 2 were intermittently treated with steroids after discontinuation of cyclosporine, and two were treated with cyclosporine and steroids. The mean duration of cyclosporine therapy was $546.5{\pm}346.2$, $1,392.9{\pm}439.7$, $439.5{\pm}84.1$, and $433.5{\pm}74.2$ days, respectively. We performed post-treatment biopsies in 8 patients and partial interstitial fibrosis and tubular atrophy were found in two. Conclusion : The thrapeutic response of cyclosporine is good in steroid resistant nephrotic syndrome, especially in minimal change. But, there is a problem of long term cyclosporine dependency.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.42 no.4
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• pp.488-505
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• 2007

The purposes of this research are twofold; 1) to verify spatial differences of tectonic movement using the spatial distribution of earthquakes, and 2) to infer mechanisms that generate spatial accumulation patterns of earthquakes in the Korean Peninsula. The first part of this sequential paper (Park, 2007) argues that the Korean Peninsula consists of four geostructural regions in which tectonic deformation and consequent geomorphological development patterns are different from each other Since this conclusion has been made by terrain analyses alone, it is necessary to verify this suggestion using other independent geophysical data. Because earthquakes are results of movement and deformation of land masses moving in different directions, the distribution of earthquake epicenters may be used to identify the direction and rates of land mass movement. This paper first analysed the spatial distribution of earthquakes using spatial statistics, and then results were compared with the spatial arrangement of geostructural regions. The spatial distribution of earthquakes in the Korean Peninsula can be summarized as the followings; firstly, the intensity of earthquakes shows only weak spatial dependency, and shows large difference even at adjacent regions. Secondly, the epicenter distribution has a clear spatial accumulation pattern, even though the intensity of earthquake shows a random pattern. Thirdly, the high density area of earthquakes shows a clear 'L' shape, passing through Pyeongannam-do, centered at Pyeongyang, and Hwanghae-do, Seosan and Pohang. The correlation coefficient between the density of earthquakes and distance from geostructral region boundaries is much higher than those between the density of fault lines and distance from tectonic division boundaries. Since fault lines and tectonic divisions in the Korean Peninsula are the results of long-term geological development, there is an apparent scale discrepancy to find significant correlations with earthquakes. This result verifies the research hypothesis that the Korean Peninsula is divided into four geostructral regions in which each has its own moving direction and spatial deformation characteristics. The existence of geostructural regions is also supported by the movement parrerns of land masses estimated from the GPS measurements. This conclusion is expected to provide a new perspective to understand the geomorphological developments and the earthquake occurrences in the Korean Peninsula.

• Korean Journal of Environmental Agriculture
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.278-285
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• 2016

BACKGROUND: Uptake patterns of ${\alpha}$-, ${\beta}$-isomers and sulfate metabolite of endosulfan (ED) by radishes grown in treated soils with ED concentrations of 2 and 10 mg/kg were investigated to establish soil management guidelines for ensuring the safety of radishes from ED residues. METHODS AND RESULTS: All samples of soils and radish plants separated into shoot and root parts were analyzed for ED residues using a gas-chromatography mass spectrophotometer, and the results were used to calculate the bioconcentration factor (BCF), indicating the ratio of ED concentrations between radishes and soils. During the experimental period, uptake and distribution rates of ED-sulfate in radishes were the highest, followed by ${\alpha}$- and ${\beta}$-ED. The BCF values to initial ED concentrations in soils were greater for root parts (0.0077 to 0.2345) than for shoot parts (0.0002 to 0.0429) and used to obtain regression equations by time. Long-term BCFs estimated by the obtained equations ($R^2$ of 0.86 to 1.00) were evaluated with the maximum residue limit (0.1 mg/kg) of ED for radishes, in order to suggest safe management guidelines of ED for radish-cultivating soils. CONCLUSION: Suggested guidelines showed the significant dependency on duration for radish cultivation and exposed concentration of ED in soil.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.53
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• pp.129-153
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• 2003

This study examines the socio-economic impacts of recent welfare reform in the United States. Based on the neo-conservative critique to the traditional public assistance system for low-income families, the 1996 welfare reform has given greater emphases on reducing welfare dependency and increasing work effort and self-sufficiency among welfare recipients. In particular, the welfare reform legislation instituted 60-month lifetime limits on cash assistance, expanded mandatory work requirements, and placed financial penalties for noncompliance. With the well-timed economic boom in the second half of the 1990s, the welfare reform seems to achieve considerable progress; welfare caseload has declined sharply to reach less than 50% of its 1994 peak, single mothers' labor force participation has increased substantially, and child poverty has decreased. In spite of these good signals, the welfare reform also has several potential problems. Many welfare leavers participate in the labor market, but not all (or most) of them. The economic well being of working welfare leavers did not increased significantly, because earnings increase was canceled out by parallel decrease in welfare benefits. Furthermore, most of working welfare leavers are employed in jobs with poor employment stability and low wages, making them highly vulnerable to frequent layoff, long-time joblessness, persistent poverty, and welfare recidivism. Another serious problem of the welfare reform is that a substantial number of welfare recipients are faced with extreme difficulties in finding jobs, because they have severe barriers to employment. The new welfare system with 5-year time limit can severely threaten the livelihoods of these people. The welfare reform presupposes that welfare recipients can achieve self-reliance by increasing their labor market activities. However, empirical evidences suggest that many people are unable to respond to the new, work-oriented welfare strategy. It may be a very difficult task to achieve both objectives of the welfare reform((1) providing adequate income security for low-income families and (2) promoting self-sufficiency) at the same time, because sometimes they are conflicting each other. With this in mind, a possible solution can be to distinguish welfare recipients into "(Very)-Hard-to-Employ" group and "(Relatively)-Ready-to-Work" group, based on elaborate examinations of a wide range of personal conditions. For the former group, the primary objective of welfare policies should be the first one(providing income security). For the "Ready-to-Work" group, follow-up services to promote job retention and advancement, as well as skill-training and job-search services, are very important. The U. S. experiences of the welfare reform provide some useful implications for newly developing Korean public assistance policies for the able-bodied low-income population.

• 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.

• 한국노년학
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.1559-1575
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• 2009

As the basic old-age pension system was enforced in 2008, the base for old-age income security was founded. However, due to the basic old-age pension played a minor role as assistant allowance, it did not reach to sufficient level to cover full income security system. It is estimated that the dependency on private transfer income among the elderly who are difficult to be economically independent is still high. Therefore the poverty rate of the elderly households, who are not economically active or who are not protected by old-age income security system, is more likely to be higher than that of non-elderly households. Based on the assumption that public transfer income system should become a central means of old-age life guarantee, this study examined the poverty mitigation effects among the elderly households by comparing the private transfer income and the public transfer income. For this purpose, we selected single-elderly-households who have been considered the most vulnerable to poverty. We used 2006- 2008 Household Income and Expenditure Survey dataset that contained single-elderly who were older than 65 years old. To understand the conditions of poverty among single-elderly-households and the degree of poverty-reducing effect originated from income transfer system, we compared the poverty rates of total households and the whole elderly households. Next, we analysed the poverty of the single-elderly-households by social demographic factors such as gender, age, and economic activity. Our major findings are as follows: First, the poverty rate of the whole elderly households were not reduced, even though the basic old-age pension and long-term care management system were enforced in 2008. Second, half of the elderly households including single-elderly-households belonged to the absolute poverty line. Relatively higher level of poverty among the single-elderly-households was found especially those who were female, unemployed, low-educated, older, and rural single-elderly-households. Third, the effect of the public transfer income on mitigating the single-elderly-households poverty showed a little progress. However, even greater poverty reducing effect was found by the private transfer income system. Fourth, in a group of the public transfer systems, the public assistance such as supporting living costs contributed more to reduce poverty of the elderly population than the public pension system did.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.17-26
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• 2010

Recently concerns have been raised due to the unbalanced supply of crops: the price of crops has been unstable and at one point the price went up so high that the word Agflation(agriculture+ inflation) was coined. Korea, in particular, is a small-sized country and needs to secure the stable supply of crops by investing in the produce importation at a national level. Investment in foreign produce importation is becoming more important as a measure for sufficient supply of crops, limited supply of domestic crops, weakened farming conditions worldwide, as well as recent changes in the use of crops due to the development of bio-fuels, influence of carbon emission on crops, the price increase in crops, and influx of foreign hot money. However, there are many problems with investing in foreign produce importation: lack of support from the government; lack of farming information and technology; difficulty in securing the capital; no immediate pay-off from the investment and insufficient management. Although foreign produce is originally more price-competitive than domestic produce, it loses its competiveness in the process of importation (due to high tariffs) and poor distribution system, which makes it difficult to sell in Korea. Therefore, investment in foreign produce importation is being questioned for feasibility; to make it possible, foreign produce must maintain the price-competitiveness. Especially, harvest of agricultural products depends on natural and geographical conditions of each country and those products have indigenous properties, so distribution system according to import and export of agricultural products should be treated more carefully than that of other industries. Distribution costs are differentiated into each item and include cost of sorting and wrapping, cost of wrapping materials, cost of domestic transport, cost of international transport and cost of clearing customs for import and export. So transporting and storing agricultural products generates considerable costs compared with other products. Also, due to upgrade of dietary life, needs for stability, taste and visible quality toward food including agricultural products are being raised and wrong way of storage causes decomposition of food and loss of freshness, making the storage more difficult than that in room temperature, so storage and transport in distribution of agricultural products needs specialty. In addition, because lack of specialty in distribution and circulation such as storage and wrapping does not solve limit factors in distance, the distribution and circulation has been limited to a form of import and export within short-distant region. Therefore, need for distribution out-sourcing which can satisfy specialty in managing distribution and circulation and it is needed to establish more effective distribution system. However, existing distribution system of agricultural products is exposed to various problems including problems in distribution channel, making distribution and strategy for distribution and those problems are as follows. First, in case of investment in overseas agricultural industry, stable supply of the products is difficult because areas of production are dispersed widely and influenced by outer factors due to including overseas distribution channels. Also, at the aspect of quality, standardization of products is difficult, distribution system is quite complicated and unreasonable due to long distribution channels according to international trade and financial and institutional support is not enough. Especially, there are quite a lot of ineffective factors including multi level distribution process, dramatic gap between production cost and customer's cost, lack of physical distribution facilities and difficulties in storage and transport due to lack of wrapping containers. Besides, because import and export of agricultural products has been manages under the company's own distribution according to transaction contract between manufacturers and exporting company, efficiency is low due to excessive investment in fixed costs and lack of specialty in dealing with agricultural products causes fall of value of products, showing the limit to lose price-competitiveness. Especially, because lack of specialty in distribution and circulation such as storage and wrapping does not solve limit factors in distance, the distribution and circulation has been limited to a form of import and export within short-distant region. Therefore, need for distribution out-sourcing which can satisfy specialty in managing distribution and circulation and it is needed to establish more effective distribution system. Second, among tangible and intangible services which promote the efficiency of the whole distribution, a function building distribution environment which includes distribution information, system for standard and inspection, distribution finance, system for diversification of risks, education and training, distribution administration and tax system is wanted. In general, such a function building distribution environment is difficult to be changed and supplement innovatively because its effect compared with investment does not appear immediately despite of its necessity. Especially, in case of distribution of agricultural products, as a function of collecting and distributing is performed individually through various channels, the importance of distribution information and standardization is getting more focus due to the problem of repetition of work and lack of specialty. Also, efficient management of distribution is quite difficult due to lack of professionals in distribution, so support to professional education is needed. Third, though effort to keep self-sufficiency ratio of staple food, rice is regarded as important at the government level, level of dependency on overseas of others crops is high. Therefore, plan for stable securing food resources aside from staple food is also necessary. Especially, governmental organizations of agricultural products distribution in Korea are production-centered and have unreasonable structure whose function at the aspect of distribution and consumption is quite insufficient. And development of new distribution channels which can deal with changes in distribution environment and they do not achieve actual results of strategy for distribution due to non-positive strategy for price distribution. That is, it implies the possibility that base for supply will become vulnerable because it does not mediate appropriate interests on total distribution channels such as manufacturers, wholesale dealers and vendors by emphasizing consumer protection excessively in the distribution of agricultural products. Therefore, this study examined fundamental concept and actual situation for our investment to overseas agriculture, drew necessities, considerations, problems, etc. of overseas agricultural investment and suggested improvements at the level of distribution for price competitiveness of agricultural products cultivated in overseas under five aspects; government's indirect support, distribution's modernization and distribution information function's strengthening, government's political support for distribution facility, transportation route, load and unloading works' improvement, price competitiveness' securing, professional manpower's cultivation by education and training, etc. Here are some suggestions for foreign produce importation. First, the government should conduct a survey on the current distribution channels and analyze the situation to establish a measure for long-term development plans. By providing each agricultural area with a guideline for planning appropriate production of crops, the government can help farmers be ready for importation, and prevent them from producing same crops all at the same time. Government can sign an MOU with the foreign government and promote the importation so that the development of agricultural resources can be stable and steady. Second, the government can establish a strategy for an effective distribution system by providing farmers and agriculture-related workers with the distribution information such as price, production, demand, market structure and location, feature of each crop, and etc. In order for such distribution system to become feasible, the government needs to reconstruct the current distribution system, designate a public organization for providing distribution information and set the criteria for level of produce quality, trade units, and package units. Third, the government should provide financial support and a policy to seek an efficient distribution channel for foreign produce to be delivered fresh: the government should expand distribution facilities (for selecting, packaging, storing, and processing) and transportation vehicles while modernizing old facilities. There should be another policy to improve the efficiency of unloading, and to lower the cost of distribution. Fourth, it is necessary to enact a new law covering exceptional cases for importing produce in order to maintain the price competitiveness; currently the high tariffs is keeping the imported produce from being distributed domestically. However, the new adjustment should be made carefully within the WTO regulations since it can create a problem from giving preferential tariffs. The government can also simplify the distribution channels in order to reduce the cost in the distribution process. Fifth, the government should educate distributors to raise the efficiency and to modernize the distribution system. It is necessary to develop human resources by educating people regarding the foreign agricultural environment, the produce quality, management skills, and by introducing some successful cases in advanced countries.