• Health Policy and Management
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.91-113
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• 2002

We report and analyze the Korean physicians' recent general strike over the implementation of the Separation of Prescribing and Dispensing Practice (SPDP) in which more than 18,000 private clinics and 280 hospitals participated. Utilizing game-theoretic models of bargaining we explain why the Korean physicians were so successful in organizing intense collective action against the government and securing very favorable policy outcomes. In particular, we highlight the role of distributional conflict among social actors in shaping the details of institutional reform. The introduction of the SPDP was a necessary first step in the overall reform of health care system in Korea. However, the SPDP was perceived to be a serious threat to the economic viability of their profession by the vast majority of Korean physicians who had long been relied on the profits from selling medicines to compensate for the loss of income due to the low service fee under the previous health care system. The strong political coalition among heterogeneous physicians enabled them to organize an intense form of collective action, the general strike. Thus, physicians were successful not only in dragging the government to a bargaining table, but also winning in the bargaining and securing an outcome vastly favorable to them. On the other hand, the lack of an overall reform plan in the health care policy area, especially the finance of the National Health Insurance and the need for maintaining an image as a successful reform initiator, motivated the government to reach a quick resolution with the striking physicians.

• Korea journal of population studies
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.181-198
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• 1997

Going beyond the previous formulations of development theories, the present paper explores the effects other than political economy on quality of life in a rapidly developing country. The major analysis takes up the historical trend and nature of the developmental transformation that is partially a consequences of state structures and partially autonomous form it in South Korea. Also, it diagnoses developmental pathways for the future track by constructing a baseline model for state transition on the basis of power game between the state and civil society in the country. The results of the historical analysis show that civil society has been transformed in the course of confrontations and interactions between the state and nationalist social movement. The distinction between developmental(or bureaucratic authoritarian) and democratic state is presented to show that these are two qualitatively different aspects of state of state power, requiring separate analytical treatment. Furthermore, the state-centric approach which emphasizes the active role of the state at the sacrifice of societal fabric-constraining social conditions for quality of life - appears to be modified. On the contrary, the impact of civil society is transmitted both directly and indirectly via labor and ecological movement for quality of life, which is critical to the formation of the welfare state in the country. The prospect for sustainable development in Korea lies in providng and expanding quality of life in terms of the financial feasibility of the state through the public-private cooperation, and abstaining from drastic and radical commitment to welfare services as is the case with the European declines in welfare state, Further studies are needed to examine the interrelationships in different historical and cultural settings of developing counties to estimate a theory of quality of life and social justice.

• Korea journal of population studies
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.70-86
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• 1987

Going beyond the previous formulations of development theories, the present paper explores the effects other than political economy on quality of life in a rapidly developing country. The major analysis takes up the historical trend and nature of the developmental transformation that is partially a consequences of state structures and partially autonomous form it in South Korea. Also, it diagnoses developmental pathways for the future track by constructing a baseline model for state transition on the basis of power game between the state and civil society in the country. The results of the historical analysis show that civil society has been transformed in the course of confrontations and interactions between the state and nationalist social movement. The distinction between developmental(or bureaucratic authoritarian) and democratic state is presented to show that these are two qualitatively different aspects of state of state power, requiring separate analytical treatment. Furthermore, the state-centric approach which emphasizes the active role of the state at the sacrifice of societal fabric-constraining social conditions for quality of life - appears to be modified. On the contrary, the impact of civil society is transmitted both directly and indirectly via labor and ecological movement for quality of life, which is critical to the formation of the welfare state in the country. The prospect for sustainable development in Korea lies in providng and expanding quality of life in terms of the financial feasibility of the state through the public-private cooperation, and abstaining from drastic and radical commitment to welfare services as is the case with the European declines in welfare state, Further studies are needed to examine the interrelationships in different historical and cultural settings of developing counties to estimate a theory of quality of life and social justice.

• International journal of advanced smart convergence
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.54-62
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• 2020

According to the Ministry of Health and Welfare, "Status of Registered Persons with Disabilities", the number of people with disabilities is 2,494,460 as of 2015. The lowest rates of children with disabilities were intellectual disabilities (23%) and mental disorders (33.3%). The highest rates of screening were blindness (97%), heart failure (94.4%), and hearing impairment (92.7%). 65.2% of visually impaired people who have already had a disability at the time of marriage, and the remaining 34.8% can be thought to be the cause of high incidence of disability after marriage. 'SID (Seed in the Dark)' project was designed to recapture the visually impaired parent's desire for attachment and the space difficulties of the blind who want to be a normal parent to their children through a visual impairment of a father with 7-year-old daughter. Using Gear VR(Virtual Reality), the general public was able to feel the surroundings as if they had no vision and focused on the hearing. Especially, We expressed the sound wave visually and added the hilarious game element which grasps the terrain of the maze by sound wave like a 'blind person who perceives the surroundings by sound' and catches up with daughter. People with disabilities who are far from mental illness often have a form of family with children. The fact that the rate of childbirth is high means that there is relatively little problem in daily life. It is wondered that the rate of blindness among the visually impaired, which accounts for 10% of the total disabled, is the highest at 97%. This is because, in the case of the visually impaired, the obstacle is often caused by aging, accidents, or diseases due to inherited causes rather than the visual disorder. In particular, However, the fact that there is an obstacle in vision that accounts for 83% of the body's sensory organs causes other difficulties in the nursing process of children who are non-disabled. Parents do not know the face of child when their visual impairment is severe. Parents are extremely anxious about worry that they will be lost or abducted if their children are not by their side. And that the child recognizes the disability of his or her parents other than the other parents easily and takes it as a deficiency. Since visually impaired parents are mentally mature parents with non-disabled people, they may want their children not to feel deprived of their disability. The number of people with visual impairments has been increasing since 2001, and people with impairments often become disabled. In addition, there is much research on the problem of nondisabled parents who have children with disabilities, while there is relatively little interest and research on the problem of nondisabled child rearing of parents with disabilities.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.31-57
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• 1991

Korean firms of all sizes, from virtually every industry, have used and are using the term "excessive competition" to describe the state of their industry and to call for government interventions. Moreover, the Korean government has frequently responded to such calls in various ways favorable to the firms, such as controlling entry, curbing capacity investments, or allowing collusion. Despite such interventions' impact on the overall efficiency on the Korean economy as well as on the wealth distribution among diverse groups of economic agents, the term "excessive competition", the basis for the interventions, has so far escaped rigorous scrutiny. The objective of this paper is to clarify the notion of "excessive competition" and "over-investment" which usually accompanies "excessive competition", and to examine the circumstances under which they might occur. We first survey the cases where the terms are most widely used and proceed to examine those cases to determine if competition is indeed excessive, and if so, what causes "excessive competition". Our main concern deals with the case in which the firms must make investment decisions that involve large sunk costs while facing uncertain demand. In order to analyze this case, we developed a two period model of capacity precommitment and the ensuing competition. In the first period, oligopolistic firms make capacity investments that are irreversible. Demand is uncertain in period 1 and only the distribution is known. Thus, firms must make investment decisions under uncertainty. In the second period, demand is realized, and the firms compete with quantity under realized demand and capacity constraints. In the above setting, we find that there is "no over-investment," en ante, and there is "no excessive competition," ex post. As measured by the information available in period 1, expected return from investment of a firm is non-negative, overall industry capacity does not exceed the socially optimal level, and competition in the second period yields an outcome that gives each operating firm a non-negative second period profit. Thus, neither "excessive competition" nor "over-investment" is possible. This result will generally hold true if there is no externality and if the industry is not a natural monopoly. We also extend this result by examining a model in which the government is an active participant in the game with a well defined preference. Analysis of this model shows that over-investment arises if the government cannot credibly precommit itself to non-intervention when ex post idle capacity occurs, due to socio-political reasons. Firms invest in capacities that exceed socially optimal levels in this case because they correctly expect that the government will find it optimal for itself to intervene once over-investment and ensuing financial problems for the firms occur. Such planned over-investment and ensuing government intervention are the generic problems under the current system. These problems are expected to be repeated in many industries in years to come, causing a significant loss of welfare in the long run. As a remedy to this problem, we recommend a non-intervention policy by the government which creates and utilizes uncertainty. Based upon an argument which is essentially the same as that of Kreps and Wilson in the context of a chain-store game, we show that maintaining a consistent non-intervention policy will deter a planned over-investment by firms in the long run. We believe that the results obtained in this paper has a direct bearing on the public policies relating to many industries including the petrochemical industry that is currently in the center of heated debates.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.127-148
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• 1990

A Milgrom-Roberts style signalling model of limit pricing is developed to analyze the possibility and the scope of limit pricing in general, noncooperative oligopolies. The model contains multiple incumbent firms facing a potential entrant and assumes an information asymmetry between incombents and the potential entrant about the market demand. There are two periods in the model. In period 1, n incumbent firms simultaneously and noncooperatively choose quantities. At the end of period 1, the potential entrant observes the market price and makes an entry decision. In period 2, depending on the entry decision of the entrant, n' or (n+1) firms choose quantities again before the game terminates. Since the choice of incumbent firms in period 1 depends on their information about demand, the market price in period 1 conveys information about the market demand. Thus, there is a systematic link between the market price and the profitability of entry. Using Bayes-Nash equilibrium as the solution concept, we find that there exist some demand conditions under which incumbent firms will limit price. In symmetric equilibria, incumbent firms each produce an output that is greater than the Cournot output and induce a price that is below the Cournot price. In doing so, each incumbent firm refrains from maximizing short-run profit and supplies a public good that is entry deterrence. The reason that entry is deterred by such a reduced price is that it conveys information about the demand of the industry that is unfavorable to the entrant. This establishes the possibility of limit pricing by noncooperative oligopolists in a setting that is fully rational, and also generalizes the result of Milgrom and Roberts to general oligopolies, confirming Bain's intuition. Limit pricing by incumbents explained above can be interpreted as a form of credible collusion in which each firm voluntarily deviates from myopic optimization in order to deter entry using their superior information. This type of implicit collusion differs from Folk-theorem type collusions in many ways and suggests that a collusion can be a credible one even in finite games as long as there is information asymmetry. Another important result is that as the number of incumbent firms approaches infinity, or as the industry approaches a competitive one, the probability that limit pricing occurs converges to zero and the probability of entry converges to that under complete information. This limit result confirms the intuition that as the number of agents sharing the same private information increases, the value of the private information decreases, and the probability that the information gets revealed increases. This limit result also supports the conventional belief that there is no entry problem in a competitive market. Considering the fact that limit pricing is generally believed to occur at an early stage of an industry and the fact that many industries in Korea are oligopolies in their infant stages, the theoretical results of this paper suggest that we should pay attention to the possibility of implicit collusion by incumbent firms aimed at deterring new entry using superior information. The long-term loss to the Korean economy from limit pricing can be very large if the industry in question is a part of the world market and the domestic potential entrant whose entry is deterred could .have developed into a competitor in the world market. In this case, the long-term loss to the Korean economy should include the lost opportunity in the world market in addition to the domestic long-run welfare loss.