• Communications for Statistical Applications and Methods
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.767-777
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• 2010

This paper investigates the relationship between the passenger car demand and business activities in the OECD. The positively linear relationships changed suddenly since 1990 and the reason was thought to be the polarized economic development of USA and Japan. The cases of other countries supports this conclusion. According to the conclusion, we modeled and estimated the car demand function of Korea.

• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.252-266
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• 2004

This study analyzes the influence of the construction of a high-speed railroad on territorial organization in France. After development of a new transportation network, the French territorial organization has been largely modified. Many economic urban areas are modified by their position in the territorial hierarchy according to their condition of connection with the TGV network. At first, spatial convergence is the most important effect of the TGV network construction. Second, the development of a transportation network concentrated in the Paris area has influence as an intensified factor on metropolitan areas and as a weakening factor on middle- and small-sized cities. Thus, this system has risk in increasing territorial imbalance in France. Third, to implant an economic activity zone around new TGV stations, a new town or a new economic center starts to develop. This is going to grow into a second core outside of the old city center so that regional spatial organization is transformed from a mono-polarized(mono-centric) organization to a multi-polarized(polycentric) one. Lastly, the integration of the EU railroad system enhances the concentration of economic activity in European metropolitan areas as each metropolitan area tries to develop more competitive space for its rising position in the global urban hierarchical system.

• Strategy21
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• s.37
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• pp.104-143
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• 2015

China's new grand strategy, the "One Belt, One Road Initiative" (also Belt Road Initiative, or BRI) has two primary components: Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the "Silk Road Economic Belt" in September 2013 during a visit to Kazakhstan, and the "21^st Century Maritime Silk Route Economic Belt" in a speech to the Indonesian parliament the following month. The BRI is intended to supply China with energy and new markets, and also to integrate the countries of Central Asia, the Association of Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN), and the Indian Ocean Region - though not Northeast Asia - into the "Chinese Dream". The project will be supported by the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), due to open in 2016 with 57 founding members from all around the world, and China has already promised US$ 50 billion in seed funding. China's vision includes networks of energy pipelines, railways, sea port facilities and logistics hubs; these will have obvious commercial benefits, but also huge geopolitical significance. China seems to have two distinct aims: externally, to restore its historical sphere of influence; and internally, to cope with income inequalities by creating middle-class jobs through enhanced trade and the broader development of its economy. In South Korea, opinion on the BRI is sharply polarized. Economic and industrial interests, including Korea Railroad Corporation (KORAIL), support South Korean involvement in the BRI and closer economic interactions with China. They see how the BRI fits nicely with President Park Geun-hye's Eurasia Initiative, and anticipate significant commercial benefits for South Korea from better connections to energy-rich Russia and the consumer markets of Europe and Central Asia. They welcome the prospect of reduced trade barriers between China and South Korea, and of improved transport infrastructure, and perceive the political risks as manageable. But some ardently pro-US pundits worry that the political risks of the BRI are too high. They cast doubt on the feasibility of implementing the BRI, and warn that although it has been portrayed primarily in economic terms, it actually reveals a crucial Chinese geopolitical strategy. They are fearful of China's growing regional dominance, and worried that the BRI is ultimately a means to supplant the prevailing US-led regional security structure and restore the Middle Kingdom order, with China as the only power that matters in the region. According to this view, once China has complete control of the regional logistics hubs and sea ports, this will severely limit the autonomy of China's neighbors, including South Korea, who will have to toe the Chinese line, both economically and politically, or risk their own peace and prosperity.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.137-165
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• 1994

Structural adjustment of industry (or industrial restructuring) seems to be inherent in the process of capitalist economic development, which tends to be proceeded with shifts from one stage to another in order to overcome structural crises generated in each stage. The structural adjustment of industry is necessarily accompanied with regional restructuring, since it is not only projected on spece, but also mediated by space. Such a restructuring necessitates industrial and uneven regional devlopment through which capital can seek excessive profits over the rate of socio-spatial average. The industrial restructuring and uneven regional development in the 1980s in Korea can be seen as a process in which capital attempted with a strong support of the govenment to overcome the crises in the end of 1970s and hence to go on rapid economic growth. In this process, capital, especially monopoly capital concentrated into few conglomerates, pursued both extensive expansion and intensive development of industry simultaneously. In results, the Korean economy could eliminate some of peripheral characters and maturate the Fordist accumulation system. The extensive expansion of the Korean industry in the 1980s was stimulated mainly through the enlargement and adjustment of investment for equipment facilities which was planned to exclude or rationalize traditional light industries on some places, and to continue rapid growth of key heavy-chemical industries, especially of fabricated metal industry, on other places. In this process, keeping mainly the existing developmental axis which polarized the Seoul Metroplitan region and the Southeast region in Korea, the enhancing spatial mobiiity of capital and the further differentiating division of labour enforced a tendency of concentration of all types of industry in the Seoul Metropolitan region, and at the same time provoked the diffusion of some industries over Jeolla and Chungchong regions in a considerable extent. The intensive development of industriai structure in the 1980s was pursued through the strategic encouragement of subcontracting small firms mainly which produced assembling components, the technical enhancement and factory (semi-) automation, and the enrichment of service industries for estate management, finance, distribution and retailing which supported and complemented the production of goods. In this process, enabling capital to extend and elaborate its domination over space through the reorganization of regulating systems, the Fordist division of labour generated a socio-spatial hierarchy in the nation-wide scale that characterized: the Seoul Metropolitan region as an overmaturated (or overarching) Fordist region performing the conceptive functions of management, research and development, in which all types of industry (including service industries) tended to be reconcentrated; Kyungsang region as a maturated Fordist region with excutive branches of large conglomerates and with subcontracting firms around them which produced standardized products through the automized production processes in secialized Fordist industries or rationalized traditional industries; and Jeolla and Chungchong regions as newly devloping Fordist regions with newly migrated branches and some subcontracting small firms-in relatively older Fordist industries or partly rationalized traditional industries. From these analyses, it can be argued that the structural adjustment of the Korean industry in the 1980s, which had carried out both through the extensive expansion and the intensive deveiopment, strengthened further uneven regional development process, even though it appears to have reduced apparently the economic and regional disparity by balancing numerically large and small firms and by extending the Fordist industrial space nation-wideiy. And it seems more persuasive to see that the Korean industrial structure in the 1980s maturated the Fordist system of accumulation, but not yet transformed towards the post-Fordist (or the so-called flexible) accumulation system, even though the Korean economy in the 1990s seems to be under a pressure of restructuring towards the latter system.

• Toxicological Research
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.73-79
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• 2012

While the ability to develop nanomaterials and incorporate them into products is advancing rapidly worldwide, understanding of the potential health safety effects of nanomaterials has proceeded at a much slower pace. Since 2008, Korea Food and Drug Administration (KFDA) started an investigation to prepare "Strategic Action Plan" to evaluate safety and nano risk management associated with foods, drugs, medical devices and cosmetics using nano-scale materials. Although there are some studies related to potential risk of nanomaterials, physical-chemical characterization of nanomaterials is not clear yet and these do not offer enough information due to their limitations. Their uncertainties make it impossible to determine whether nanomaterials are actually hazardous to human. According to the above mention, we have some problems to conduct the human exposure risk assessment currently. On the other hand, uncertainty about safety may lead to polarized public debate and to businesses unwillingness for further nanotechnology investigation. Therefore, the criteria and methods to assess possible adverse effects of nanomaterials have been vigorously taken into consideration by many international organizations: the World Health Organization, the Organization for Economic and Commercial Development and the European Commission. The object of this study was to develop risk assessment principles for safety management of future nanoproducts and also to identify areas of research to strengthen risk assessment for nanomaterials. The research roadmaps which were proposed in this study will be helpful to fill up the current gaps in knowledge relevant nano risk assessment.