KJC Korea
Journal Central

This paper analyzes the effects of structural change on productivity and economic growth of countries near Korean East Sea, specifically Korea, China and Japan over the period 1970-2015. To do so, the productivity effects are decomposed by employing Asia KLEMS and World Bank data databases. The results show that Korean intra effects of structural change on productivity growth have been increasing before Korean financial crisis but decreasing after the crisis. Over the whole period, within-effects is found to be smaller than the sum of static and dynamic between-effects which is created by shift in employment share across the sectors. This implies that effects of shift in employment from industries with slower productivity growth toward those with faster productivity growth can have larger than intra-effects only with changes in industrial composition but without any changes in productivity. For China, in contrast with Korea and Japan, the results show that all productivity effects are positive and increasing over time, indicating no solid evidence for Baumol’s disease yet. For all countries above, the results show that within-effects are positive and larger than between-effects, which supports structural bonus hypothesis, rather that structural burden hypothesis or Baumol’s disease hypothesis. Overall, the experience from the three countries near Korean East Sea tells us that the effects of structural change are dependent on development stages. In earlier stage of development, the effects are larger than in later stages of development, which leads to different contribution to economic growth.

The “non-intervention” is one of the most important diplomatic principles China has adhered to in international relations since the early 1950s. However, with the rise of China, the need for China’s international intervention has gradually expanded due to its changing international status and environment, and academic debates have emerged at home and abroad over the validity and sustainability of the policy of non- intervention. This study pays attention to the perception and discourse of Chinese intellectuals regarding this debate. Through the discourse analysis of the writings of Chinese intellectuals, especially political scientists, this research attempts to explore China’s internal perspectives and orientations regarding its principle and policy of non-intervention. Through such analysis, this article argues that there are three main positions in the debate about China’s policy of non-intervention. The first is a critical position that raises the need for a change (correcting or scrapping) in China’s policy of non-intervention. The second is a conservative position that the existing principle is still beneficial to China and it should continue to adhere to the principle. And, the third is a pragmatic point of view that it calls for more creativity and flexibility in its implementation and application of the principle. These discourses of Chinese intellectuals are gradually converging into the third pragmatic approach. Thus, the debate within China over its policy of non-intervention is not focused on whether to scrap or adhere to the principle of non-intervention, but rather on how to protect and promote China’s expanding national interests, international status and role as a rising great power through more flexible and pragmatic interpretations and applications of the principle. In this light, the dispute among Chinese intellectuals over the policy of non-intervention can be seen as part of a broader diplomatic and strategic discussion in which China as a rising great power searches for the conditions and ways of legitimate international intervention to protect its national interests and to deal with the many new expectations and demands facing it domestically as well as internationally.

In order to cope with consequences of rapid climate change on the Korean peninsula, active environmental cooperation between North and South is critical. To do this, we need to look at how North Korea understands climate change. This study traces North Korea’s discourse on climate change from 2009 to 2017 through an analysis of North Korean media reports. 968 articles related to climate change were collected from “Rodong Sinmun” and “Minju Joseon,” which are representative media of North Korea. In addition, only nouns were extracted from the headlines of articles containing ‘climate’ or ‘warming’ in the text, and the contents and characteristics of the discussion on climate change over time were reviewed by comparing the yearly word cloud and the keywords network. Analysis of discourses on climate change over time were carried out through news reports, and the contents and characteristics were reviewed by yearly word cloud and key word network analysis. As a result, the biggest change in North Korea’s discourse on climate change was the regime change. Both Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un regimes, in general, stress that climate change is a serious problem that can bring about a global food crisis, and that international joint efforts and alternative energy developments are needed. However, unlike the Kim Jong-il regime’s self-rehabilitation and Arctic development discourse, science farming and forest response discourse were formed in the Kim Jong-un regime. In particular, the Kim Jong-un regime is distributing more concrete discourses on the meaning, consequences, and countermeasures of climate change compared to the previous regime, and actively discourses on climate change adaptation. This study can contribute to the search for directions and measures for future North-South climate cooperation by identifying North Korea’s understanding of climate change, its willingness to respond, and its needs.

This paper is written to analyze the summit meeting between the US President Donald J. Trump and the North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-un at Hannoi, Vietnam, on February 27-28, 2019. For this purpose, it revisits a few theories on negotiation and reviews the going-ons at the Hanoi summit meeting. It analyzes the meeting using the concepts in negotiation theories such as end state, decision making style, types of negotiation, BATNA and a walk-away decision of the US North Korean sides respectively. As a result, this paper found that the Hannoi negotiation was destined to collapse because of a huge difference between the end states of the US and North Korea, in which the US wanted a total dismantlement of North Korean nuclear weapons and North Korea possession of nuclear weapons. The US adopted the bottom-up decision making style and hard-positioning strategy, which were totally different from those in Singapore summit meeting in June 2018. Furthermore, the US surprised North Korea by sudden decision to walk away. In this sense, the US managed to know the North Korean intention to possess nuclear weapons, but North Korea failed to lift UN sanctions at the meeting.

The U.K decided its leave from EU through the national referendum on June 23, 2016. The two-year negotiation for Brexit officially started with the U.K's notice on Brexit to EU on March 29, 2017. Unlike the expectation on the progress of the negotiation, the negotiation has not been very successful. It is rather in trouble mainly because of the different thoughts of British politicians on Brexit itself. There are three possible types of future trade relations between the U.K and EU: 1) through successful Brexit negotiation, 2) through ‘No deal Brexit’, which means the U.K leave from EU without any decisions on the future trade relations between the two, and 3) U.K’s Cancelation of Brexit. Among these, the possibility of ‘No deal Brexit’ is increasing. If ‘No deal Brexit’ happens, in particular, finance, trade and investment sectors in Korean economy could get some negative influence from it. Thus the Korean government should make efforts to minimize the possible negative influence from it. ‘No deal Brexit’ means that Korea will not be able to enjoy preferential status as a member country of the Korea-EU FTA. To avoid the situation, firstly the Korean government has made efforts to sign a FTA with the U.K before ‘No deal Brexit’ happens. To finalize this effort the Korean government should take measures to get the approval for the FTA from the Korean Parliament before October 31, 2019. Secondly, the Korean government should take measures to minimize the negative influence, in particular, the short term influence, on the financial sector. ‘No deal Brexit’ will increase the uncertainty in the global financial and foreign exchange markets on the short term basis.

This study analyzed the changing nature of Japan’s external strategy after Abe’s cabinet from the perspective of economic statecraft. Based on a stable long-term government, Abe Cabinet is bring a fundamental changes in domestic and external restraints of Japan in the post-war by implementing comprehensive national reforms for economic revival, social safety and security reform. In particular, the Abe cabinet’s economic statecraft, aimed at creating an economic environment that contributes to its security interests, is being pursued as a national strategy to reshape Japan’s role and status in response to China problems after the rise. This study conceptualized the economic statecraft of the Abe cabinet in three ways, and analyze external strategy of Japan differing from that of post-war era. First, it built the foundation for multilateral hedging, by leading the institutionalization of multilateral cooperation such as CPTPP agreement. Second, it is expanding competitive engagement in response to China’s BRI initiative. Third, Tokyo is strengthening strategic alliance through bilateral and multilateral diplomacy including military technology cooperation, beyond economic relations. Based on the implications of Abe cabinet’s economic statecraft on Japan-China relations and regional order in East Asia, this research reviews the tasks of Korea’s national strategy.

Through the analysis of the history, institutions and recently published literature and major policy documents of Japan, this paper aims to find out how Japan actually recognizes foreign aid, how this perception has evolved, especially how it links ODA, which is referred to as development cooperation, to economic cooperation projects with recipient countries. To this end, we examine Japan’s ODA-related policies and laws, systems and promotion systems to explain the process of Japan’s ODA policy transformation in terms of coordination of development cooperation and economic cooperation, and analyze the mechanisms used to encourage effective participation by the private sector through case-in-depth analysis and how these mechanisms actually work. Through this, the paper confirmed that since World War II, Japan has continuously taken a strategy to link its economic cooperation with development cooperation, and later put forward humanitarian purposes with the introduction of the concept of human security in the 1990s and 2000s, but it has again returned to the aid policy considering previous economic and national interests since 2010 as the Japanese economy entered a prolonged recession. In the process, the Japanese government set up a strategy and promotion system to systematically link its development cooperation, or ODA funds, with Japanese companies’ exploration and advance into overseas markets, in which Japan publicly declared its policy of linking development cooperation with economic cooperation and equipped with necessary policy documents and organizational systems. The low level of civic group’s resistance to Japan government ODA strategy is attributable that Japan civil society got used to link ODA with economic interests since World War II, and the government’s ability to form a consensus on this stance as the country entered a long-term economic recession in the 2000s.

This paper analyzed the trends of Myanmar studies in Korea by using text mining. This attempted to find the tendencies of research on Myanmar in Korea and to bring new discussions in light of “New Southern Policy (NSP)”. The corpus of Myanmar research were built for the extraction of “keyword” and “co-occurring words”, which was utilized to visualize networks of intellectual structures on the Myanmar research. Prior to Myanmar’s reform and opening, Myanmar research in Korea showed a tendency to be subordinate to other research. In addition, Myanmar was partly studied only in terms with local understanding. On the other hand, after the reform and opening, Myanmar research started to obtain an independent position as a research subject in Korea. The perspective to see Myanmar was also changed from an “object” to an “economic partner”. However, these results were derived from a drive from a perspective of economic interests. Therefore, it is necessary to discuss a new direction of Myanmar research from viewpoints of establishing mutual trust.

The purpose of this study is to identify the effect of authentic leadership on turnover intention of foreign workers in South Korea with analysing the moderating effect of job engagement. In this research, job engagement consists of three factors such as vigor, dedication, and absorption. For the empirical analysis on turnover intention for the target sample, this study carried out the survey for the in-house subcontracting foreign workers working at the shipbuilder located in Ulsan area. The survey questionnaire are translated into four languages and distributed anticipated samples. There were 176 valid respondents. Result from the factor analysis and the hierarchical regression model indicate that a higher level of authentic leadership is negatively related to the turnover intention of foreign workers. The results also show that vigor among three core constructs of job engagement is positively related to the turnover intention of foreign workers. however the coefficients of other core constructs of job engagement such as dedication and absorption not statically significant relationship. Considering the moderating effect of job engagement on turnover intention of foreign workers, the variable, vigor has negative coefficient, however the variable, dedication has found that positive coefficient. Results shows that strong support for the hypothesis of effect of authentic leadership on the turnover intention of foreign workers. These findings have critical implications for providing leadership practices in reducing turnover rate of foreign workers. Therefore, corporate leaders need to consider personal characteristics of foreign workers such as job engagement, home country culture, ethnicity, Korean language proficiency, and psychological contracts to reduce the turnover rate of their foreign workers. And these efforts will be helpful to solve the manpower shortage and improve competitive advantages of SMEs in South Korea.

This article explores local characteristics of municipality that can have an influence on legislative behaviors of members of the Provincial Assembly in Korea. Studies conducted in the United States have suggested that size, scope and bias of municipalities, despite the impact of national politics, are significant predictors of the outcome of local elections in lower-level democracy. Based on the result, the paper hypothesizes that legislative behaviors of local representatives are likely to be constrained by the local characteristics in Korea. Using a survey of all members of the 10th Provincial Assembly in Gyeongsangbuk-Do, the paper examines this hypothesis. The empirical findings show that size, scope and bias of municipalities in Gyeongsangbuk-Do have a close association with legislative behaviors of members of the Assembly. In particular, low levels of population size, autonomous power and bias enable local representatives to represent residents and increase legislative productivity. As a result, the paper rethinks the way we evaluate that the local politics has been under the control of national politics in that local representatives respond to the local characteristics of municipalities in Korea.