2021, Vol.11, No.3

Asia Review 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.86

pISSN : 2234-0386
https://journal.kci.go.kr/asiareview

Faced with waning exports and returns from innovation, the Korean government has prioritized the facilitation of small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) innovative activity and marketization. But are policies working? This research deploys a multi-level perspective to more holistically examine individual, firm, network, and industry-level factors, to include the regulatory environment, impacting Korean SMEs. Quantitative analyses of data from the 2016 national Korean Innovation Survey delve into 1) firm motivations, costs, and purchases; 2) internal R&D and external cooperation and knowledge sourcing; 3) innovation impacts on domestic and international market positioning and entry; and 4) sources of support for, and impediments to, innovation in order to provide a nuanced understanding of Korea’s innovation ecosystem. In a novel bifurcation, analyses compare firms engaged in new and incremental innovation and those engaged in only incremental innovation. Some key differences between the innovator groups emerge, such as training objectives, spending patterns on external knowledge, collaborate activity, and market positioning. Though there may be room for cautious optimism, perceived challenges to policy would appear to be equal for both groups of innovators, including those related to personnel, financing, and other government support and policy incentives. Implications for Korea’s future are discussed.

Urban migration and an aging rural population have left numerous regions of South Korea “population extinct” and its villages economically, socially and physically neglected. Top-down rural policies and the promises of modernization prioritize cities, industrialization and individualism over rural living, agriculture, and community. City in a Village 1.0 (CiViChon 1.0) is a narrative tool of invention combines conventional research methods with methods and tools from world building and narrative fiction to imagine an alternative future for villagelife in South Korea. CiViChon 1.0 is a fictive village, on a fictive site, inhabited by fictive personas that projects a possible alternative future for rural Korea. Taking into account the history of modernization of the country and current realities, sand based on an epistemology of imagination, CiViChon challenges the inequality and unsustainable practices to imagine a more diverse, equitable, and physically, socially and mentally sustainable rural future. It is a shift that demands an evolutionary shift from the biospheric and geosphere to the development of the noosphere that towards greater individuation and unification of its elements as the complexity consciousness necessary to reconfigure the relationships between humans, and between humans and the non-human world.

This article delves into the effects of the continuing structural economic transformation on the economic and development geography of Southeast Asia. An important question that will be addressed is to what extent the shift from agriculture and fisheries to manufacturing and services is not only contributing to urban economic growth, but also to rural poverty reduction. The 1997-8 Asian Financial Crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic have demonstrated that the process of urbanization is not linear. Rural areas appear to be more meaningful than anticipated in the quest for achieving livelihood security. This article discusses findings of qualitative fieldwork conducted in farming and fishing communities in Southern Thailand and Northern Vietnam amidst the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020; a year in which both countries managed to deal with the pandemic relatively well. But how were farmers and fishers affected by the pandemic and what does it reveal for achieving living standards? Based on the empirical results it discusses the implications for rural Southeast Asian futures as well as efforts to reduce spatial disparities and foster more balanced national geo-economies.