Euijune Kim

The effects of highway investments on production costs in the Korean manufacturing sector

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of highway projects on production costs using the demands of production factors and production cost functions for Korean cities. The major contributions that are distinguishable from previous works are to integrate the cost function with the transportation demand model for the impact analysis of the highway project and to estimate the cost savings of manufacturing production with the reduction of the travel time. This approach goes on to identify how the development of highways could decrease the production costs of the manufacturing sectors across regions. The model is applied to two highway routes, the SN and EW projects. Although the investment expenditures of the SN highway are expected to be much higher than those of the EW, this project can improve not only the accessibilities of manufacturing–oriented cities, but also the urbanization effects by the population agglomeration in the Seoul Metropolitan Area. The approach in this paper is expected to contribute to setting up the economic priorities of highway projects.

Elicitation of health values from mortality risk reduction

Abstract There are concerns regarding uncertainty about the accuracy of applying available empirical willingness-to-pay (WTP) estimates for reducing accidental deaths to value changes in risks of pollution-related deaths. In this study, we develop a theoretical model on defining WTP, and its determinants, and derive WTP estimates for changes in pollution-related mortality risks with varying morbidity and timing attributes. A survey is designed and conducted with 100 subjects. Each subject was to complete five choice sets and provided a range of implicit values of statistical life (VSL). The choices are estimated using the logit procedure. And, using the results of estimated multinomial logit model, the VSL is estimated to about

Spatial Patterns of Population Growth and Social Indicators' Change in Korea: an Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis

6.2 million.

Impact of high-speed railroad on regional income inequalities in China and Korea

The purpose of this paper is to identify regional concentration in terms of population and social indicators such as employment and infrastructure, at a disaggregated level using the Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA). Through an investigation of the change of Moran—I in 1995–2007, we found two phenomena, dramatic deconcentration in 1998, and gradually increasing concentration after 1999 due to the IMF financial crisis and its recovery pace. Analysis of local spatial autocorrelation revealed a concentration of regions with positive population growth in SMA and near—SMA and that with negative population growth in the south of Gangwon, Gyeongbuk and the midst of Jeolla in 2000–2005. The distribution of employment growth follows the spatial patterns of population growth among various social indicators. We can conclude that the concentration of population spread out over SMA and the gap of population between growing regions and declining ones widened after the financial crisis. The gap of in population numbers between growing and declining regions is not expected to be reduced within a short period due to simultaneous employment and population growth and past regulatory policies in SMA cannot achieve population deconcentration.

Quantitative Regional Economic and Environmental Analysis for Sustainability in Korea

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to analyse the impact of opening high-speed railroad (HSR) on the regional income inequality in China and Korea. The convergence models are applied to test the effect of the HSR on regional growth in terms of GRDP per capita across 455 cities and counties along the Beijing–Shanghai HSR corridor and 112 cities and counties along the Seoul–Busan HSR corridor, respectively. The results indicate that at the national level, a trend of convergence emerges during the three-year period of analysis in both China and Korea. At the HSR passing area level, HSR contributes to accelerate regional economic convergence and reduce the regional income disparities in China and Korea; however, HSR has different impacts on reducing the regional income inequality in China and Korea considering the HSR station cities. In Korea, the regional inequality is rather wider among the cities where HSR station located.

The Effect of Municipal Consolidation on Urban Manufacturing Productivity

Kim, Euijune; Kim, Brian H. S..2016.Quantitative regional economic and environmental analysis for sustainability in Korea,Book,SingaporeSpringer Singapore,New frontiers in regional science: Asian perspectives/25,247

Meta-analysis of rate of return on road projects

This paper is focused on analyzing the effect of municipal consolidation on urban manufacturing productivity in Korea. The results indicated that the investments and government expenditures of the consolidated cities have higher impacts on urban labor productivities by generating agglomeration and network economies. Road expansion, on the other hand, generates a negative effect on productivity due to wider market openness from the improvement of spatial accessibility. Urban labor productivity can be maximized when the population size of the consolidated city is between 300,000 and 400,000 people. This size can be applied to setting up a guideline for reorganizing regional administrative units in Korea.

The impact of intergovernmental transfer funds on interregional income disparity in Indonesia

Abstract This study analyzes the impact of economic and spatial factors on the economic return on Korean road projects, using meta-regression models and Monte Carlo simulation. This paper finds that the internal rate of return (IRR) is negatively affected by the distance and land acquisition cost (LAC) in urban areas while it is positively related to the population density, ratio of manufacturing workforce to total workforce, and LAC in rural areas. In addition, net benefits can be generated if a road length is less than 5 km. Finally, the IRR tends to be highly sensitive to the population density.

Spatial Agglomeration and Firm Performance in Korean Manufacturing Industry, 2012

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to identify the impact of intergovernmental transfer funds on interregional income disparity in Indonesia after reforms by the administration towards fiscal decentralization. Household income data from 2006 and 2011 are used to generate interregional and intraregional income inequality index data. It is found interregional income disparities are affected by intergovernmental transfer funds, physical and human capital, employment, agglomeration, industrialization, openness, and geographical location. Intraregional income inequalities in rich provinces and poor provinces both have positive effects on interregional income disparity. If a central government increases the intergovernmental transfer fund to the rich province by 1%, this widens the interregional income disparity by 0.68%. An increase of the intergovernmental transfer fund to poor provinces by 1% is expected to reduce the interregional income disparity by 1.06%.

Distribution and coassociations of trace elements in soft tissue and byssus of Mytilus galloprovincialis relative to the surrounding seawater and suspended matter of the southern part of the Korean Peninsula

This study tries to answer whether agglomeration economies lead to better firm performance or not. By adopting the random-intercept-multilevel model for 2012 Korean manufacturing data, we suggest an econometric specification strategy of the constant returns to scale (CRS) Cobb-Douglas production function in the multilevel structure, estimate the specified model, and analyze the results. Adopting two types of agglomeration economies represented by specialization and diversification, the results discussed in this paper can be summarized into three policy implications. First, specialization and diversification show the opposite effects on firm performances in most regions except the regions in some large metropolitan areas. In an ideal situation, both effects are not a trade-off phenomenon, and highly agglomerated cities are expected to have synergies from both effects. In the 2012 manufacturing sector in Korea, however, the offset between the two factors is observed. This means before the central and local governments implement industrial policy, they need to consider the existing mix of manufacturing sectors to not lose one of the agglomeration economies. Second, the specialization effect is relatively weaker than the diversification effect across regions. Even though there is no rule of proper effect size on both factors, these weak specialization effects can be seen as a big threat to the current economic growth strategies in Korea. If this specialization fails at a region level due to the weak specialization economies, the policy goal may not be achieved. Last, spatial heterogeneity in intercepts of the regional level dominates both specialization and diversification effects. In addition, diversification follows the trend of spatial heterogeneity. In 2012, the production performance of manufacturing firms leaned heavily on the region-specific factors not explained by the two agglomeration variables. Considering the fact that there have been many policy concerns to resolve regional imbalance in economic growth, this questions the effectiveness of the previous efforts. From this standpoint, the strong spatial heterogeneity and the following trend of diversification emphasize that the local or central government, which tries to boost the economy in a lagging region and to achieve a well-balanced regional economy in a county, may want to think about the human capital or the other factors to increase productivity rather than just industry allocation strategy.