• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.7 no.11
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• pp.619-627
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• 2020

This study measures the relationship between labor productivity and national competitiveness. Through the shift- share analysis method, the paper has separated labor productivity into three factors: static shift effect, dynamic shift effect and endogeneous effect. Next, in combination with the Granger causality test, the paper examines the relationship between the factors constituting labor productivity and competitiveness during the period from 2005 to 2017. Research data is collected from General Statistics Office and annual global competitiveness reports. The results show that the interaction between labor productivity with global competitiveness index (GCI) in Vietnam has similar variation. Nevertheless, when separating labor productivity into three effects, this relationship shows more clearly that the impact of labor productivity on GCI scores is mainly caused by endogeneous effect, not by static shift effect or dynamic shift effect. Therefore, in order to improve its competitiveness, Vietnam should focus on a number of solutions: reforming the education system towards developing thinking capacity and creative capacity; fostering industrial manners to create dynamic and flexible workers; building the State with sufficient capacity to implement consistent and transparent policies; formulating policies to attract all economic sectors so that they actively participate in the field of human resource training for the country.

• 한국사회정책
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.1-23
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• 2016

This study evaluates the strategic capacity of Korean labor union movement by examining policy alternatives and strategic steps that the Federation of Korean Trade Unions and the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions have shown in response to Park Geun-Hye government's labor market structuring policies. While the government-led labor reform was carried out as intended, organized labor has not simply failed to achieve progressive labor reforms to enhance employment security, but also to exert their strategic capacity effectively for preventing Park's labor market flexibilization policies. The two national centers have not been able to exert their strategic capacity (such as intermediating, framing, articulating, learning) for mobilizing the resources of internal solidarity, network embeddedness, narrative discourse, and organizational infrastructure. In particular, the formation and diffusion of public discourse is a significant part of strategic capacity of labor unions dealing with the labor politics of labor market restructuring, since organized labor, which is under the unfavorable constraints of limited movement resources and power imbalance with the business circle, needs to mobilize massive support and participation from union members and civil society organizations. In this light, it becomes of more importance for labor union movement to exert their strategic capacity toward internal solidarity and network embeddedness in the stage of labor market reforms. Under the recent stage of labor reforms, however, the labor unions has not harnessed their movement resources effectively, but undertaken their protest in a traditional manner, thereby losing its public efficacy from inside and outside. Moreover, it is necessary to build and activate the network of organic solidarity among organized labor, civil society organizations and progressive political parties, in order to cope with the pro-business coalition of power elites for accomplishing pro-labor reforms.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.7 no.5
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• pp.291-304
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• 2020

This paper examines the factors that drive temporal income diversification in rural areas of the Mekong River Delta in Vietnam, based on a framework that conceptualized diversification as a function of a household's capacity to diversify and incentives (both push and pull factors) to diversify. Drawing from five rounds of the Vietnam Living Standard Measurement Surveys covering a 13-year span (1993-2006), two panel datasets made from five cross-sectional samples are used for the analyses. The data are drawn from the Vietnam General Statistics Office. Both tobit model and Ordinary Least Squares model with random and fixed effects are applied. The main points emerging from the analysis is that income diversification is strongly influenced by household labor capacity. The relationship between household labor capacity and increasing insertion in non-farming wage activities is not driven by unobserved time-invariant factors such as household ability and motivation, but is instead driven by the higher labor capacity of households. In terms of the other household capacity variables, the effect of farm size is much larger in terms of retaining households in traditional occupations as compared to pushing them towards non-farm wage employment. Other variables such as household access to financial capital do not play an important role.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.41 no.2
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• pp.41-58
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• 2019

Health capacity to work for the elderly is an essential piece of information for designing social policies in an aging society. Here, we assess the health capacity to work of older men in South Korea and provide a cross-country comparison. Following the methodology proposed by Milligan and Wise (2012), which uses the cohort mortality rate as a proxy for overall health status, we quantify the additional employment capacity of current older men in reference to the mortality-employment relationship of a generation ago. Despite the high employment rate of older men in South Korea, we find substantial additional employment capacity among older men (those aged 55 or more) as of 2016 comparable in size to those found in other advanced countries. We also find evidence that older men are not merely capable of working but are also willing to work, and many of them are increasingly combining pension income and work. These findings suggest that labor supply disincentives for older men embedded in public pension systems in South Korea need to be thoroughly reexamined and adjusted accordingly lest they should inhibit the labor supply of older workers.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.30 no.3 s.110
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• pp.141-146
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• 2005

Worldwide consumption of vegetable soybean has been increasing recently, but, in the process of vegetable soybean production threshing and seperation work accounts for about $80\%$ of overall labor. Therefore, developing of the vegetable soybean thresher is necessary to reduce the cost of labor. The main objective of this study is to develop the vegetable soybean thresher which is suitable for domestic circumstances. The threshing and separating performance, operating cost, and field capacity of developed vegetable soybean thresher are investigated and analysed. The results are as follows. The effective field capacity of the developed vegetable soybean thresher was shown as 4.8hr/10a, and reduced as much as 11.7 times compared with human labor. The ratio of unthreshed soybean-pod to stem after threshing work was shown as $1.5\%$ and the damaged pod ratio of detached soybean was shown as $1.8\%$. The cost of human labor was shown as 2,560,000 won/ha, but the operating of the developed vegetable soybean thresher was shown as 503,000won/ha. If the vegetable soybean thresher would be used in our farm, the minimum cultivation area appeard to be 22.7a for the cost effective management.

• Journal of Korean Port Research
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.35-55
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• 1989

Today, about 99% of total import and export cargo in Korea is being transported through the port. The general trends of cargo handling show increases in capacity and speed, In order to cope with these trends, it is not only required to raise the efficiencies of port operation and function but also necessary to decide the optimal amount of the skilled labor force for cargo handling in the port. Cargo handling in the port is basically relied on the cargo handling facilities. Therefore, it is very important to reserve the amount of labor force for cargo handling system has been developed up to a certain level but the personnel management system which is the superior structure has not been followed well. In this study, therefore, we show a method to determine the required amount of labor force for cargo handling considering the amount of cargo and type of cargo handling work per each cargo, and the optimal amount labor force in cope with the fluctuation of the basic cargo handling labor force with respect to the time of in and out cargo flow in the viewpoint of minimizing the expences due to reservation of extra labor force than needed and firing employment of labor force using the Dynamic Programming. The derived algorithm is introduced into the computer simulation for Pusan port with the analyzed real data such as amount of cargo handling in the port with respect to working hour, cargo capacity, working step, the ratio of cargo handling facility and actual number of workers and we estimated the required labor force. As a result of analysis the labor force of Pusan port showed the over-employment such as maximum 21.4%, minimum 8.2% when we assumed that the averages of actual working hours and days were 8 hours in a day and 20 day in a month.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.2
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• pp.189-215
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• 2012

This paper reads Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) in light of the 18th-century understanding of 'sympathy' including those of Hume and Smith and also in light of what Michael Hardt in our century has called "affective labor." I argue that the imaginative capacity and "seeing" are crucial in understanding Smith's idea of 'sympathy.' By showing how the monster's ugliness precludes any human character from sympathizing with him, Mary Shelley exposes that Smith's idea of sympathy fails to maintain social harmony. Mary Shelley revises Smith's 'sympathy' and makes it more radical by suggesting that the active affective labor could bridge the epistemological distance lying between the agent concerned and the impartial spectator. I first read Smith's idea of sympathy as an imaginative capacity which is inevitably influenced by 'seeing' and visual perception. Then I analyze the scenes in which the creature in Frankenstein fails to acquire any human sympathy due to his ugliness, and show how the specular nature of 'sympathy' is disrupted when one party is visually ugly and deformed. I conclude that affective labor and active moral reflection on the part of the spectator need to be provided when the agent concerned is 'ugly' and thus challenges our habitual epistemological boundary. Shelley's re-evaluation of Smith's sympathy, thus, suggests that affective labor may not be something that women alone have to perform, but an ethical practice that concerns all human beings and that can transform the otherwise flawed human capacity for sympathy.

• Safety and Health at Work
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.1-9
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• 2020

Background: As the impact of climate change intensifies, exposure to heat stress will grow, leading to a loss of work capacity for vulnerable occupations and affecting individual labor decisions. This study estimates the future work capacity under the Representative Concentration Pathways 8.5 scenario and discusses its regional impacts on the occupational structure in the Republic of Korea. Methods: The data utilized for this study constitute the local wet bulb globe temperature from the Korea Meteorological Administration and information from the Korean Working Condition Survey from the Occupational Safety and Health Research Institute of Korea. Using these data, we classify the occupations vulnerable to heat stress and estimate future changes in work capacity at the local scale, considering the occupational structure. We then identify the spatial cluster of diminishing work capacity using exploratory spatial data analysis. Results: Our findings indicate that 52 occupations are at risk of heat stress, including machine operators and elementary laborers working in the construction, welding, metal, and mining industries. Moreover, spatial clusters with diminished work capacity appear in southwest Korea. Conclusion: Although previous studies investigated the work capacity associated with heat stress in terms of climatic impact, this study quantifies the local impacts due to the global risk of climate change. The results suggest the need for mainstreaming an adaptation policy related to work capacity in regional development strategies.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.39 no.4
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• pp.283-289
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• 2014

Purpose: This study was carried out to evaluate the labor requirement and the cost-reducing effects of the pick-up type pulse crop harvester compared with those of conventional harvesting for soybeans and red beans. Methods: The labor requirement and the cost to gather, thresh, and clean for conventional harvesting operations were surveyed; those for the pick-up type pulse crop harvester were estimated for soybeans and red beans. The annual capacity of the harvester and the break-even area of the two harvesting methods were also estimated. Results: For soybean harvesting, the labor requirement of 0.57 hour-persons/10 a for the pick-up type pulse crop harvester reflects a 91.9% reduction in the labor requirement of 7.00 hour-persons/10 a for conventional harvesting. Machinery costs of 51,300 won/10 a for the harvester were estimated for an annual harvesting area of 52.5 ha/year, representing a reduction of 33.3% from the 78,700 won/10 a cost of conventional harvesting. A break-even area of 28.4 ha was estimated for the two harvestings. For red bean harvesting, the labor requirement of 0.57 hour-persons/10 a for the harvester reflects a 92.6% reduction in the labor requirement of 7.66 hour-persons/10 a for conventional harvesting. For an annual harvesting area of 52.5 ha/year, annual capacity of 52.5 ha/year and machinery costs of 51,700 won/10 a were estimated for the harvester, reflecting a reduction of 44.7% in the cost of 93,500 won/10 a for conventional harvesting. A break-even area of 23.1 ha was estimated for the two harvestings. A governmental subsidy for purchasing the harvester could contribute to reducing the break-even area and harvesting costs. Conclusions: The pick-up type pulse crop harvester for soybean and red bean harvesting could reduce the labor requirement and costs of conventional harvesting, and a governmental subsidy for purchasing the harvester will improve the economics of the harvester for efficient mechanical harvesting.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.7 no.7
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• pp.555-563
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• 2020

The study seeks to investigate the relationship between knowledge sharing and innovation in garment and textile enterprises. While previous research has found many factors influencing knowledge sharing, little research has been done about the influence of knowledge sharing on innovation in enterprises in developing countries like Vietnam. In particular, the textile industry plays an important role in export, but outsourcing is accounting for a high proportion of trade; it is necessary to increase innovation in order to increase the competitive advantage by internal capacity. The data is collected from a survey of 245 employees at 20 textile and garment enterprises in Vietnam to study the knowledge sharing influence on innovation. The methodology includes pilot study and quantitative method. The pilot study tests the questionnaire on the respondents. The quantitative method applies SEM analysis to measure the knowledge sharing influence on innovation. The results identify eight factors that positively impact knowledge sharing: rewarding, teamwork, management support, joy of knowledge sharing, communication, trust, commitment, and information technology. This study also shows that knowledge sharing affects innovation. The main findings are discussed for textile and garment enterprises to apply innovative capacity in the context of increasing global integration.