Documents South Korea 125 results

"This article first provides a game-theoretic, endogenous view of institutions and then applies the idea to identify the sources of institutional trajectories of economies development in China, Japan, and Korea. It stylises the Malthusian phase of the East Asian economies as a peasant-based economies in which small conjugal families self-managed their working times between farming on small plots—leased or owned—and handcrafting for personal consumption and markets. It then compares institutional arrangements across these economies that sustained otherwise similar economies. It characterises the varied nature of the political states of Qing China, Tokugawa Japan and Yi Korea by focusing on the way agricultural taxes were enforced. It also identifies different patterns of social norms of trust that were institutional complements to, or substitutes for, the political states. Finally, it traces the path-dependent transformations of these state-norm combinations along subsequent transitions to post-Malthusian phases of economic growth in the respective economies."

"This paper gives an account of the financial crisis that took place in Korea from the point of view of the Korean population, using survey data collected in 1998 and 1999. Although both, internal and external factors were blamed as causes, domestic factors were considered to be of greater importance. After identifying respondents as supporting either market-based or state-based reform strategies using factor analysis, various determinants of these alternative views are being analysed within the framework of regression models. A particularly interesting result is that, contrary to theoretical assumptions and empirical evidence on other regions, it is political ideology and not individual economic determinants that helps to explain the respondents' attitudes towards reform strategies in Korea."

"The welfare states in East Asia have been widely considered underdeveloped. Since the definition and measurements of social policy and the welfare state are subject to change depending on the specific historical, political and economic context, the welfare underdevelopment thesis deserves scrutiny. In Japan, Korea and Taiwan, agricultural protection and enterprise welfare, among others, have been surrogates of conventional welfare policies. As a way of critically engaging in the debate over the East Asian welfare model, this paper focuses on these two areas of surrogate social policy and explores their empirical basis with the OECD data on Japan and Korea. The result shows that surrogate social policy measures such as producer support estimates for agricultural protection and mandatory private social spending for enterprise welfare add up to make a difference between the East Asian countries and the other OECD members. This suggests a distinct political-economic model for East Asian social welfare. "

" This article argues that the nature of precarious work can be grasped as the disintegration of the employment relationship which was a historical compromise concerning the distribution of cost and risks between capital and labour, in particular, along Fordist corporate boundaries, while analysing how the formal-and-informal division of labour has changed, corresponding to the change of power relations between labour and capital, focusing on Korean cases.
Many legal systems fail to identify who should take responsibility for workers' rights, by viewing individual corporate entities separately. However, labour law actors – the ‘worker' and the ‘employer'- should be identified not in a single workplace but with reference to the whole value chain and labour market. In conclusion, it is argued that it is essential to enlarge collective labour rights, and in particular, to secure freedom of association for precarious workers beyondemployment boundaries.

"We report our findings on cross-societal variations in values concerning Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) held by senior executives from five economies. We find that executives in all five economies are concerned with the roles of their firms in society, with those in Japan most so and those in Hong Kong least so. However, executives in each context have different conceptualizations of how firms contribute to society. The data suggest variation along three dimensions: implicit versus explicit CSR, stakeholder-oriented versus production-oriented CSR within implicit CSR and different main stakeholders within stakeholder-oriented CSR. We discuss the implications of these findings for future research on CSR and for comparative business systems."

"This paper provides statistical information on internationalization, human resources and labour market outcomes in ten important developed market economies (DMEs). Such data are useful for practitioners and academics who are interested in international HRM. The article's aim is to provide easily accessible statistical tables of selected characteristics, which can be used to draw initial comparisons between countries and to test competing accounts of the impact of globalization on national patterns of employment relations. It includes standard sources so readers can elaborate and update these data."