• Analyses & Alternatives
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.195-222
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• 2022

From the economic development perspective, economic growth should accompany structural improvement in order to meet complex demands from a society. In the context of development economics, economic growth is critically dependent on successful structural advancement. The issue of structural change is also important for advanced economies as the landscape of modern industry is changing fast. Many advanced countries of slow growth are experiencing dawdling changes in industry structure. However, there is no definitive answer to the question of whether there is a causal relationship between structural change and growth. This study empirically assesses the relationship between structural change or 'speed' thereof and economic growth in developed countries of OECD. Rather than looking into the causes of structural changes, this study simply measures structural changes in OECD economies and examines if structural change is really contributing to growth. The reason why this study focuses on advanced countries of OECD is rather obvious; technological innovation and emergence of new industries pressure these countries to restructure their economies to address these new challenges though they are at stages well beyond conventional industrialization. And structural rigidity can always limit growth even in advanced countries. The main results of this study can be summarized as a positive relationship between 'change and growth'. 'Change' in this study refers to changes in the industrial structure based on value-added and was analyzed to have a close positive relationship with economic growth. This result is consistent with arguments of early development economists emphasizing structural upgrade as an indispensable process for growth and development. The result of this study potentially confirms that the main argument of development economics is valid also for advanced economies. One of our results suggests that business/professional services and social services should be main targets for restructuring for advanced economies. The rational may be that rapid convergence of manufacturing and services is a key for structural advancement in the era of new technologies. Obviously, as manufacturing technology and production are standardized, it is difficult to secure international competitiveness through traditional manufacturing alone and the role of R&D, design, logistics, and marketing is becoming more important.

• Korea Trade Review
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• v.45 no.4
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• pp.153-169
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• 2020

This study compares and analyzes the effects of GVC participation on export competitiveness in manufacturing and service industry in 36 OECD countries and 28 non-OECD countries. According to the statistical analysis result, the GVC participation had a negative impact on export competitiveness in manufacturing industry, while it had a positive impact in the service industry. In the case of the manufacturing industry, participation toward the backward GVC had a positive impact on export competitiveness before the financial crisis, besides, participation toward the forward GVC had a positive impact on export competitiveness. In the case of the service industry, export competitiveness through forward GVC participation has increased since the financial crisis has occurred, and backward GVC participation was estimated to have a negative impact on export competitiveness. The results of this study implies that, to secure export competitiveness, a converged approach of the manufacturing and service industries to upgrade the global value chain is needed.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.8 no.9
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• pp.261-272
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• 2021

Rapid economic growth in recent years has caused a surge in energy consumption among Southeast Asian countries and laid a considerable burden on the already inadequate power infrastructure. As a result, frequent blackouts and prolonged outages have become common and weakened firm productive performance in those years. The main objective of this study is to examine the impact of power infrastructure quality on the performance of Southeast Asian manufacturing firms. In this study, the World Bank Enterprise Surveys was employed as the training dataset of 4723 manufacturing firms in the period of 2015-2016. The results of this study reveal that industrial firms that suffered from power outages had consistently lower productivity. As measured by the length of such events, more severe outages tend to be more harmful to the firm. Furthermore, the findings also indicated that most firms relied on self-generated electricity to reduce the negative impact of power outages, but this does not bring many benefits when operating at a small scale in some countries. Consequently, this study contributes to a growing literature that examines the economic impact of public infrastructure and how detrimental the poor state of such services is to a firm's downstream operations, productivity, and growth.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.117-136
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• 2021

Purpose - The research is aimed at investigating the dynamics of economic cooperation among countries which share historical and genetic affinity. Research design, data, and methodology - The study analyzed historical and genetic affinity after reviewing related thesis data on countries with historical relations studied by domestic historians. After that, it was applied to the method of designating the counterparts for economic cooperation and suggesting economic cooperation measures within a comprehensive range. Results - Economic cooperation with the counterparts should complement the ongoing economic cooperation with each country among their planned national strategies. Korea proposes such matters in a way that cooperates and develops to obtain mutual economic benefits. Among the associated countries, Mongolia is for the underground resource processing industry, Turkey for the investment of companies advancing into neighboring countries, Kazakhstan for the diversification of business centered on the manufacturing industry, Uzbekistan for the modernization and diversification of industrial production, Turkmenistan for the localization of resource-based industries and Export promotion, Hungary for the increase in investment in line with the East-ward policy, Finland is for the cooperation in the knowledge-based industry. Conclusion - This economic cooperation can raise Korea's international status to the next level and further strengthen our voice right in the international community.

• Korea Trade Review
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• v.45 no.1
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• pp.101-118
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• 2020

This study aims to quantify the effects of non-tariff measures (NTMs) on exports in the Korean manufacturing industry. To do this, we employ product-level export data that includes information about whether or not a product is affected by NTMs. One of the main results is that NTMs (SPS/TBT) on average led to reduction in Korean exports. However, the effects of NTMs differed depending on the income level of the NTM-imposing country. The NTMs imposed by high-income countries, such as U.S.A. and Japan, were found to impede Korean exports, whereas the export effect of NTMs imposed by low-income countries such as China was found to not be statistically significant. In addition, the results analyzed based across industries, income level, and types of NTMs are as follows. First, NTMs imposed on textile-related products generally hindered exports regardless of the type of NTMs, but its negative impact on exports was noticeable in the case of NTMs originating from high-income countries. On the other hand, chemical product-related NTMs were found to lead to an increase in Korean exports, and it had a positive effect in the case of SPS imposed by low-income countries. In other industries except for textile- and chemical-related products, the effects of NTMs on exports were either statistically insignificant or showed inconsistent patterns.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.123-133
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• 2018

Recently, countries are pursuing vigorous research, development and commercialization in cooperation with industry, academia and researcher to take the lead in building a smart manufacturing system that is at the center of the fourth industrial revolution. According to a research report [4], the competitiveness of Korea in the area of basic technology, hardware, and software of the smart factory is reported to be less than 70% of the developed countries. In this study, we reviewed the existing research literature and analyzed the current status of smart manufacturing technology and major issues in the manufacturing industry. We tried to provide ideas for collaboration with core technology researchers and companies with business processes. Internet of Things, CPS and robot technologies have been the most active in smart manufacturing area. It can be seen that cooperation between researchers and industries in the early stage is being done through the case of industry application of each core technology.

• Journal of Technology Innovation
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.14-35
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• 1999

This paper presents the relationship between the pace of structural change and the magnitude of employment growth in the manufacturing sector in OECD countries. To measure the pace of structural change, the compositional change index in value-added in manufacturing sector is introduced. For mid to long-term there seems to be a positive relationship between the pace of structural change and the magnitude of employment growth. In those countries with higher value of the compositional index, the employment growth in manufacturing sector was generally higher. To analyse the characteristics of structural change in manufacturing sector, this paper classifies manufacturing industries into groups: one based on technology, one on orientation, one on wages and one on skills. The international comparison of manufacturing sector's employment patterns based on above four classifications are presented. International comparison suggests that Korean manufacturing sector move into jobs with more skills and knowledge The structural change of SMEs and large firms are compared based on above four classification methods. It is shown that SMEs' employment in low value sectors, that is low-technology, labor-intensive, tow-wage, and unskilled sectors, have risen faster than SMEs' employment in high-technology, science-based, high-wage and skilled sectors. Large firms' employment have been mainly increased in high value sectors. However, the employment growth of both large and small firms have been concentrated on production worker-intensively-using sectors, i.e. unskilled sectors. This widened the wage differential of production workers by firm sizes and concurrently led to severe shortage of production workers for SMEs, which has little ability to pay high wage to production workers because they usually belong to low-wage sectors. Korea need to push SMEs forward to high value sectors. The premise of that is, however, to pull large firms out of production worker-intensively-using sectors.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.289-306
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• 2021

This paper aims to investigate how and to what extent FDI impacts the relative demand for skilled labor within firms in the case of developing countries. The analysis uses a sizeable micro-level dataset for Malaysian manufacturing industries using the System-GMM estimators to control the estimations' endogeneity problems. For this purpose, the study uses foreign equity share at the firm level to investigate foreign ownership effects at the firm level and the Horizontal FDI index by Smarzynska Javorcik (2004) to analyze FDI intra-industry linkages influence on the structure of labor demand for Malaysian domestic firms. Our findings indicate that foreign ownership increases the skilled demand within Malaysian manufacturing through the learning process, exclusively for small- and medium-sized firms (SMEs). Conversely for foreign-owned firms, changes in their skilled-labor share do not associate with changes in firm-level foreign equity share. We conclude that foreign ownership per se is not the major contributing factor for skill upgrading in Malaysian manufacturing firms. Furthermore, the competitive pressures caused by foreign firms' presence within the same industry - namely horizontal FDI - has a significant negative spillover effect on the level of skilled-labor share for domestic firms in the Malaysian manufacturing sector within periods of the understudies.

• International Commerce and Information Review
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.343-367
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• 2009

This research is about global investment for managing the important position, what Korea is doing in World's main market. Considering there are some differences between developed countries' model and developing countries' model in doing direct overseas investment, they target to get political agreement and develop the new invest plan and strategy by understanding changes of Korean manufacturing companies in direct overseas investment between 2000 and 2007 and analyzing the change of yearly investment motivation factors and determining factors for investment. The result from this result let us know that company should develop their own idea for their competitive advantage by doing direct overseas investment with the existing theory which convinces the need of competitive advantage for investing overseas. I set actual model and analyze results from it with the considering that it is so important to get knowledge and information for globalizing companies to invest overseas and companies, which want to be world leading ones for their field through innovation and changes, need to have more active strategy. And, the overseas investment, which was already done in other countries, 1. Review its realities and tendency in terms of investing countries, investing industries, and its scale. 2. Set up an actual model, based on strategic combination of investing location select and determination of Korean manufacturing companies and yearly investing factor-effect analysis. 3. Analyze how the situational factors have influenced and what factors would be considered for direct overseas investment. From the analyzing result, even though it is fairly true that raising wage and getting resources, avoiding customs, and developing alternating industries for export had influenced at the beginning, overseas investing companies' policy will be influenced by the results from studying marketing-pursuit type, which emphasizes to manage trade income and outgo, keeping the balance in the black, ensuring raw materials, local producing and manufacturing by using low-wage people for local sale, and situation for changing investing tendency as service industry.

• Journal of Appropriate Technology
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.188-195
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• 2021

In recent years, additive manufacturing (AM) processes have emerged as an important manufacturing technology for a multi-item small sized production to lead the 4th industrial revolution. The layer-by-layer deposition characteristics of AM process can rapidly produce physical parts with three-dimensional geometry and desired functionality in a relatively low cost environment. The goal of this paper is to investigate the applicability of AM process to appropriate technologies for developing countries. Through the review of examples of appropriate technology of the AM process, the possibility of a practical usage of the AM process for the appropriate technologies is examined. In addition, significant applications of the AM process to the appropriate technology are introduced. Finally, future issues related to production of physical parts for developing countries using the AM process are discussed from the viewpoint of the appropriate technology.