KJC Korea
Journal Central

Food festival can serve a critical platform for establishing a regional identity and forming a regional image. This study has examined the current status of food festivals in Korea and conducted case studies of food festivals overseas in order to provide strategies for sustainable food festivals that can contribute to regional development. Overseas food festivals have clear and differentiating concepts. Accordingly, the cases of overseas food festivals are categorized into four types: tradition and food culture (Oktoberfest, Tomatina, Menton Lemon Festival), the world capital (Taste of Paris, Taste of London, Madrid Fusion), local residents’ participation (Meguro Residents’ Festival, Mochitsuki Festival) and specialty food products (Shimonoseki Fugu Festival, Galway Oyster Festival). The implications for developing sustainable food festivals in Korea are derived as follows: Sustainable food festivals should be environmentally friendly, inclusive of anyone, local residents driven, economically beneficial by creating high added value, experience stimulating the five senses through food, and satisfying needs for healing and wellness. Furthermore, regional food festivals can be promoted by storytelling delivering differentiating concepts and themes representing a region’s unique identity.

In recent times, the transition discussions that have been actively developing at home and abroad in relation to the climate crisis are focusing on the transformation (or transition) of the development model. This study focuses on the case of Ecuador in Latin America, which has been actively pursuing these discussions before our country. Since the 1990s, the Buen Vivir discourse has been formed by indigenous movement as a transition discourse, distancing from the mainstream development model based on extractivism. It has since evolved into an umbrella term in Latin America that encompasses various alternatives to the mainstream model of development. Meanwhile, in Ecuador, the regime of Rafael Correa, which came to power in 2007, drafted a new constitution based on the concept of Buen Vivir and implemented various alternative policies. This study analyses the Buen Vivir discourse and its practice in Ecuador, focusing on the case of the northern Ecuadorian Amazon. While civil society proposed Post-oil development as a radical practice of the Buen Vivir discourse, the Correa regime faced the dilemma between Post-oil development and extractivism in a phased process of action that took into account the various interests of realpolitik. By analysing the dilemmas in Ecuador’s transition discourse and practice, this study draws implications for transition in the era of climate crisis.

This article discusses the policy of supporting the traditional economic activities for the sustainable development of indigenous minorities living on the territory of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug of Russia. This region is home to four indigenous peoples (Chukchi, Eskimo, Lamut, Chuban) whose main traditional economic activities are reindeer herding and marine mammal trapping. The state supports this industry in a series of programs including the “State Program of Agricultural Development of the Chukotka Autonomous District”, but this is not enough. The biggest problem is the lack of labor force. Out of 16 reindeer farms, 14 are registered as state-owned. The same situation is in marine mammal trapping industry. Given the lack of motivation for the children of reindeer herders and marine mammal hunters to continue their parents’ business, it can be assumed that privatization is an effective way to solve this problem. In general, it can be concluded that the policy of state support for the traditional economic activities of the indigenous peoples of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug lacks consistency.

For decades, there has been growing attention to copyright infringement issues in the Chinese digital entertainment industry. Under the stricter supervision and regulation of the Chinese government, Chinese video-on-demand (VOD) platforms are under pressure to compete for exclusive licensing. Even though the platforms endeavor to produce more original series and diversify revenue sources instead, they still need to invest in copyrighted videos to capture customers from rivals as well as retain them. Therefore, the platforms make opportunistic or even illegal moves which may generate profit but lower customer satisfaction. Despite the importance of the rising issues of online VOD platforms, research has not been conducted extensively. Therefore, we investigate the influences of legal compliance and opportunism on purchase intention of Chinese online VOD users in this study. Based on the literature, we develop hypotheses between legal compliance, opportunism, perceived value, brand loyalty, consumer satisfaction, and purchase intention and examine the relationships between them using structural equation models with survey data. All hypotheses are supported except for those with opportunism, indicating that legal compliance leads to purchase intention of online VOD users through perceived value, brand loyalty, and consumer satisfaction.

The study attempts to conduct a comparative analysis of the competitiveness of agricultural products between Korea and China caused by the signing of the FTA in 2015 and the novel coronavirus in 2020 and draws complementary issues in this regard, which are different from the existing studies. Existing studies related to Korea-China agricultural products focus on the production and exchange of agricultural products as well as the feasibility of establishing a Korea-China free trade area. Taking agricultural products as research objects, the paper divides them into categories 1-4 (Chapters 1-24) according to the HS code division rule. Using the Revealed Comparative Advantage Index (RCA), trade competitive advantage index (TC), trade complementarity index (TCI), Grubel-Lloyd index (G-L), and other data, the competitiveness and complementarity of agricultural products between Korea and China are examined in detail. The conclusion shows that China's RCA index has relatively increased since 2015, but has begun to decline since 2020. Second, the TC index of Korea and China also remained stable around 2015. China’s TC index continued to fluctuate slightly until 2019 and has fallen since then, which also led to the downward adjustment of its TC index. Third, as a result of the TCI index, Korea-China agricultural trade complementarity is relatively high. Fourth, the G-L index between Korea and China has been on the rise since 2015, and the complementarity has decreased, but since 2019, the G-L index has fallen and the complementarity has increased. The paper provides the following insights. First, Korea must identify new, competitive varieties that can gain access into the domestic market. Second, as an impact of the new coronavirus, there is an increased need to fortify the cooperation between the two governments. Third, it’s necessary for Korea and China to overcome international trade protectionism in the agricultural sector.

Brexit meaning UK’s leaving from the EU happened on January 1, 2021. It is generally understood that Brexit has given more negative impact on the UK economy than Covid 19 Pandemic. After Brexit the ratios of EU member countries in the UK' export and import also reduced dramatically. It is quite difficult to show exactly how much negative impact Brexit has given to the UK economy. Simply because COVID-19 pandemic started in the late 2020 also hit the global economy very badly. The GDP growth of the UK reduced very rapidly after Brexit. The income of the British people also reduced. Inward foreign direct investment to the UK also reduced after Brexit. The Brexit also resulted the change of the relations between the EU and the UK in many ways. In particular, special trade relations between the TWO, which featured by the single market and customs union changed because of Brexit. In other words, the UK lost its special status as a member country of the EU. So when the UK trades with EU member countries they should take the same procedure to Non EU member countries. And the British people could not work anymore in a EU member country without a needed visa issued by the government of the EU member country where they want to work. To revitalize economy damaged by Brexit the UK government adopted new trade policy. The UK government also changed its immigration policy after Brexit in order to have more efficient labor policy, which could give economic and social benefits to the British people. Unlike the UK government’s wish, however, it seems to take more time to revitalize UK’s economy through new trade policy. And the new immigration policy resulted in a new problem, the lack of skilled workers in almost every UK industry. This situation is even creating inflation threat in the UK. Thus it seems that the UK government should continue its efforts to minimize or to stop the negative economic impact of Brexit on the UK economy.

Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) issues are gaining attention in politics, academic literature and business, yet the sudden soaring interest has brought certain ramification. Some issues are overlooked and lagging behind due to skewed focus on the causality and relationship with particular area such as financial performance. Under the assumption that there are underlying concepts beyond the issue of ESG evaluation score, the aim of this research is to explore and conceptualise the embedded ESG topics and policy implications from EU legislative documents. Considering limited research have been attempted to analyse ESG topics in EU documents and textmining algorithm to the field of ESG discussion provides further research topics, this research contributes to both practical and academic implications. Using textmining methodology of wordcloud and LDA topic modeling analysis, this research analyses the 89 documents retrieved from EUR-Lex portal published during 2019-2021, containing ESG related keywords. The result shows that 10 main topics are discovered from the analysis, and EU ESG discourse can be categorised three pillars with one regulatory framework: 1) ESG and Trade and Social development, 2) ESG and Sustainable Investment and 3) ESG and Industry with 4) ESG regulations.

This paper empirically examines correlations among innovation barriers and their deteminants, using data basis merging 2016 and 2018 Korea’s Innovation Survey data implemented by STEPI. Our empirical results, first, show that the null hypothesis that innovation barriers are not related each other. statistically rejected. In estimation of the multivariate probit model, all correlation coefficients between the innovation barriers such as the cost of innovation projects, lack of firm capability and market conditions are found to be statistically significant, which means that ignoring the potential interrelation of innovation barriers can lead to biased results. This implies that government should provide incentive and financial support to promote innovation activities for expansion of market efficients and reduction of innovation barriers. Second, our empirical results show that the effects of R&D activities are different, depending on the types of innovation barriers. Internal R&D and joint R&D activities positively affect all types of innovation barriers but external R&D activities only affect the lack of firm capacity significantly. Finally, our empirical results show that R&D cooperation and legal protection for innovation have negative effects on innovation barriers. These suggest that government policies are needed for promotion of innovation activities to overcome innovation barriers. In particular, government needs to support SMEs to reduce innovation barriers through the promotion of R&D cooperation with other firms or research institutes and through the expansion of R&D investment.