KDI School Archives
Not a member yet
4667 research outputs found
Sort by
a comparative public policy analysis between South Korea and Ecuador
Get PDFThesis(Master) --KDI School:Master of Public Management,2020.Providing convenient and sustainable public transport systems is one of the most fundamental challenges for any local and national government. Massive transport systems represent a primary means of maintaining economic opportunities, reducing inequalities, and ultimately enhancing the quality of life for people. Studies demonstrate that the deterioration of the public transportation system is associated with a continuous increase in the emission of CO2, traffic jams, illegal services, and road fatalities, which have come a public health problem. Therefore, policymakers have been called to act to improve public transportation systems and make sure that they evolve with the needs of society.
This study explores the case of the intercity bus service in Ecuador and tries to shed light on recommendations to solve the structural problems behind the obsolesce of the service. Overlapping routes, accidents, robberies, unpunctual and poor service, limited coverage in rural areas, and lack of information for trip planning and online sales tickets are some of the issues why citizens have switched to using illegal door-to-door services. By conducting a comparative public policy analysis with the Korean Bus Reform and using guided interviews with Korean and Ecuadorian officers, it was discovered that 1) the lack of long-term vision, 2) the inconsistent rule of law, 3) the limited technology and human resources, 3) the need of a technical savvy, but above all the little compromise of authorities have hampered the smartization of public transportation in the country. Even though there are have been partial solutions and advances, authorities and experts recognize that it is necessary to rethink holistically how the transportation system is designed and operated, especially in the context of the recent pandemic lockdown. According to experts, it is expected that small and financially unstable bus operators will fill for bankruptcy. Therefore, authorities and critical stakeholders should ground a sincere discussion to build a collaborative transport system that benefits all not only those who have influenced the system for particular gains.
The delivery challenges include the tools of the Korean Bus Reform, such as stakeholders’ engagement, quasi-public bus operation/management, adoption of an integrated and technical fare system, and centrally-controlled operations. The application of ICT significantly contributed to the successful implementation. Thus, it is recommended to analyze different scenarios and alternatives for a public-private partnership that optimize and accelerate the modernization of the public bus system.CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 2. COMPARISON ANALYSIS OF PUBLIC POLICY BUS REFORM IN ECUADOR AND SOUTH KOREA
CHAPTER 3. A DATA‐DRIVEN STRATEGY FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF A SMART INTERCITY BUS SYSTEM IN ECUADOR
CHAPTER 4. CONCLUSIONS AND POLICY RECOMMENDATIONSmaste
language policy perspectives
Get PDFThesis(Master) -- KDI School: Master of Public Policy, 2020Does the use of non-indigenous languages (French, English, and Portuguese) as official languages affect the industrialization in Africa? This paper investigates the relationship between the average distance to official language, which captures the ability to speak an official language, and the manufacturing value-added per capita of 29 sub-Saharan Africa countries. Using a panel correlated random effect and instrumental variable approach, the paper finds that an official language distant to the most spoken local language in Africa negatively and statistically affects the manufacturing value-added. The policy implication of this study is that African’s policymakers should rethink the language policy by encouraging the use of the local languages as official languages.I. Introduction
II. Overview: Language Issues and Industrialization in Africa
III. Literature review
IV. Data and Empirical Strategy
V. Results and discussion
VI. Summary and ConclusionsOutstandingmasterpublishedSouleymane YAMEOG
Readability of Korean-Language advertising disclosures moderates knowledge effects
No full textPurpose Government policy mandates information disclosure in financial communications to protect consumer welfare. Unfortunately, low readability can hamper information disclosures' meaningful benefits to financial decision making. Thus, this experiment tests the product evaluation and decision satisfaction of Korean consumers with less or more subjective knowledge and with or without personal finance education. Design/methodology/approach A between-subjects experiment examined responses of a nationally representative sample of 400 Korean consumers toward a Korean-language credit card advertisement. Findings Financial knowledge improves financial product evaluation and decision satisfaction. More readable disclosures improved evaluation and satisfaction among less knowledgeable consumers. Less readable disclosures did not. Consumers without financial education exhibited lower evaluations and decision satisfaction regardless of readability. More knowledgeable consumers and those with financial education performed equally well regardless of disclosure readability. Practical implications Financial service providers seeking more accurate evaluations and better decision satisfaction among their customers should use easier-to-read disclosures when targeting consumers with less prior financial knowledge. Social implications One-size-fits-all financial communications are unlikely to achieve public policy or consumer well-being goals. Government-mandated information should be complemented by augmenting financial knowledge and providing personal finance training. Originality/value Although almost a quarter of the world's population lives in East Asia, this is the first examination of readability in disclosures written in East Asian characters rather than a Western alphabet. Previous readability research on Asian-originating financial disclosures has been conducted on English-language texts. This study extends knowledge of readability effects to growing East Asian markets.1
Housing affordability, borrowing constraints and tenure choice in Korea
No full textThis paper analyses the linkages between housing affordability and borrowing constraints, and the impact of the latter on housing tenure decisions in Korean cities during the period 2006-2016. The conventional aggregate measures of housing affordability provide a mixed picture. The price to income ratio (PIR) increased in major cities but the home purchase affordability, or repayment affordability improved between 2006 and 2016. Also, the access to mortgage finance increased substantially thanks to the expansion of mortgage supply, low interest rates and lenient macroprudential regulations. We investigate whether and how these changes affected household home purchases using the household-level micro data from the 2006 and 2016 Korea Housing Surveys. We construct the variable indicating the degree of borrowing constraint in terms of wealth each household faces and show that the number of borrowing-constrained households dropped significantly between 2006 and 2016. We then investigate the effect of the wealth constraint by including a measure of the degree of the borrowing constraint as an explanatory variable in the tenure choice equation, together with other key variables such as the cost of owning relative to renting. Estimation results confirm that, as expected, the propensity to home purchases declines if households are judged as wealth-constrained. It was also found that the detrimental effect of the wealth constraint on home ownership increased significantly, particularly for severely constrained households, while the homeownership rates for others improved during our study period. Our findings suggest that affordability measures that do not consider borrowing constraints may not be very helpful in gauging affordability of home purchases at the household level.1
Limits of engagement? The sunshine policy, nuclear tests, and South Korean views of North Korea 1995–2013
No full textCan positive domestic messages generated by a foreign policy of engagement toward another country change public views regarding that state? How resistant are such changes to events that contradict the positive messages? I argue that while positive government messages about an adversary can significantly improve public opinion, highly consequential foreign policy events that contradict the messages influence public opinion at the cost of elites’ ability to shape it through their messages. Such differing effects can lead to a polarization of opinion when the content of the messages and the nature of events diverge from each other. Leveraging the unpredictability of North Korea’s foreign policy behavior, the South Korean government’s sustained policy of engagement toward it during the years 1998–2007, and North Korea’s first two nuclear tests to examine the relative impact of consequential foreign policy events and elite messages on public opinion, I find strong evidence consistent with this argument.1
the case of Kazakhstan
Get PDFThesis(Master) -- KDI School: Master of Public Policy, 2020In connection with the growing threats to demographic security, supporting families with children has become an important area of state social policy. The main problem of the demographic situation at the present stage is the low birth rate, which determines the reduction in the population and leads to the aging of the age composition of the population. Kazakhstan also faced the problem of low birth rates. The main measure of influence on the demographic situation in Kazakhstan is the state financial support for families with children, which should serve as an impetus for the birth rate increase. However, according to the Statistics Committee of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the trend in low birth rates has not changed. In the course of the correlation and regression analysis, it turned out that the effect of an increase in the number of preschool institutions is greater than an increase in financial assistance and a qualitative analysis proves the results. However, both quantitative and qualitative analysis do not deny the effectiveness of increasing state financial assistance. Nevertheless, the study proved that parents'' confidence in the future of their children, in particular, access to quality education, has a greater impact on the decision to become “large” families.I. INTRODUCTION
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
III. DATA AND RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
V. CONCLUSION
VI. REFERENCES
VII. APPENDIXmasterpublishedRyskul TAGMANOV
Opportunism and Opportunity Cost as Antecedents of Participatory Behavior
Get PDFDespite its positive impacts, public participation often begets a representativeness problem due to participants’ opportunism and opportunity cost. Using the survey on 2,000 citizens in South Korea, the research results show that: (1) citizens’ opportunism in terms of self-interest or free-riding may significantly influence their participatory behaviors and (2) citizens’ opportunity costs may act as a mediating factor, i.e., a higher opportunity cost lessens the impact of opportunism on participation. The findings imply that a desirably represented citizen participation can be supported by considering and mobilizing (not manipulating) citizens’ sense of opportunism and opportunity cost
Local Nutritional Availability and Adult Height: Evidence from South Korea, 1946-1977
Get PDFIt is generally accepted that the rapid economic growth in South Korea during the second half of the twentieth century greatly improved the standards of living of the country’s population. However, it is not fully understood how the living conditions in South Korea changed over time, and what are the major factors that produced the changes. For instance, there is still much to be learned about how the process of improvements differed by socioeconomic characteristics, and about how the experiences of each birth cohort differed with each other. We do not fully understand how particular economic or social changes affected the wellbeing of the population, either.
Rigorous research on these issues is often seriously hampered by shortage of appropriate data, especially for the periods prior to the 1970. In our previous study (Lee 2016), supported by the 2015 Cliometric Study Program of the KDI School of Public Policy and Management, we investigated how biological indices of standards of living, such as height, weight, and body-mass-index (BMI, hereafter) changed across birth cohorts born between 1946 and 1957, based on a newly collected sample of military records for more than 18,000 conscripts. We found that the mean height at conscription slightly declined from the 1946 cohort to the1951 birth cohorts before it rapidly increased across cohorts. The mean height increased by more than two centimeters in just 6 years between 1951 and 1957. We also found considerably large variations across provinces in the patterns of changes in anthropometric measures as well as the levels of the measures. In the previous study, however, we were unable to determine what factors produced the changes in anthropometric measures across different birth cohorts and across different regions. In the present study, we investigated how nutritional availability in two crucial periods for human growth, namely, early childhood (from conception to age 2) and adolescence (from age 12 to age 16), affected the heights of Korean conscripts born from 1946 to 1957.
For the purpose, we constructed province- and county-level data on agricultural productions, and matched the dataset with the sample of conscripts using the information on place of residence. We also explored how much improved nutrition during infancy and adolescence contributed to the increase in heights between the 1951 cohort and the 1957 cohort. We used the amounts of calories and three major nutrients (protein, fat, and carbohydrate) per farm household adult equivalent in a given province or county as our primary measures of local nutritional availability. In addition to nutrition variables, we considered local environmental conditions indicated by population density and nonfarm population share as well as personal and family characteristics such as season of birth, family size, and father’s occupation. We selected several different samples for whom the effects of our measure local nutritional availability on heights might differ with one another. These samples include: men from counties with information on nutritional availability, men from rural counties (baseline sample), and farmers’ sons living in rural counties. The regression results suggest that variables on local nutritional availability are generally positive and statistically significant. According to the results from the rural county sample, a person who spent infancy in a province that produced calories per farm population one standard deviation above the mean would have been about 0.2 centimeters taller at the time of conscription, if other things equal. A one standard deviation increase in protein or carbohydrate in infancy would result in an increase in height by a similar magnitude. The estimated coefficients for nutritional availability variables in adolescence are generally smaller in magnitude and statistically less significant. A major drawback of our analyses is that the true birth place of a conscript is unknown. To reduce potential measurement errors arising from geographic mobility between birth and conscription, we used a subsample of men from rural counties whose province of residence at the time of conscription is the same as the province of “original family place (Bonjeok).” If a conscript’s current address and Bonjeok are identical, it is likely that he was born in the current province of residence. About 79 percent of the full sample and 91 percent of the rural county sample reported the same current and Bonjeok province, which implies that prior geographic mobility of the conscripts in the sample was probably low. The regressions conducted based on the subsample reveal larger effects of nutritional availability on heights, compared to the baseline results. We performed height regressions with various samples alternative specifications. Adding the conscripts’ own education does not noticeably change the results. By contrast, inclusion of province fixed effect greatly increases the size of the effects of nutritional availability in early childhood.
The effects of nutrition availability variables in adolescence are stronger for the 1946-1950 birth cohorts than those for the 1951-1957 birth cohorts. If the sample is limited to farmers’ sons from rural areas, the estimated coefficients for nutrition variables become larger. If the sample is extended to include men from urban counties with minimum agricultural productions, the baseline results remain little changed. We finally explored how much improved nutrition contributed to the increase in height between the 1951 and 1957 birth cohorts. The cohort trends of nutritional availability and height match well, which is consistent with the hypothesis that early-life nutrition mattered for growth of stature for the birth cohorts under investigation. For estimating the contribution of improved nutrition to the increase in height, we computed the change in height predicted by change in nutrition using height regression results and estimated change in each nutritional availability variable between 1951 and 1957. The result suggests that improved nutrition in early childhood and adolescence accounts for 30 percent to 50 percent of the increase in adult height that was gained from the 1951 and 1957 birth cohorts. Increased nutritional availability during early childhood explains a lion’s share of the contribution.
The results of this study strongly suggest that nutrition was an important determining factor of biological standards of living indicated by adult height. In particular, provisions of calories and protein were strongly associated with larger stature. Food availability during early childhood was more critical for human growth than nutrition in adolescence. This result is consistent with the consensus that catch-up growth in adolescence is insufficient to fully make up for deficiencies in early childhood. Although our estimate is highly preliminary and subject to errors, it is likely that improvements in the quantity and quality of nutritional intakes that were made possible by increased incomes and enhanced agricultural productivity significantly contributed to the rise of biological standard of living indicated by changes in anthropometric measures
political trust, gender, and job satisfaction
Get PDFThesis(Doctoral) -- KDI School: Ph.D in Development Policy, 2020Chapter 1: Political trust in the transition countries
Chapter 2: Gender wage gap in times of crisis of the Central and Eastern European (CEE) transition countries
Chapter 3: Job satisfaction in post-socialist countriesdoctoralpublishedHye Young WO
the case of Republic of Korea
Get PDFThesis(Master) -- KDI School: Master of Public Policy, 2020Even though the Korean government directs majority of the funds allocated to solving poor air quality into projects related to transportation on the road, why it the performance of these projects not as good as other projects? To answer this question, this paper explores the impact of various factors on the budget of particulate matter in Korea by using a panel data analysis tool, the pooled OLS. After examining the relationship between factors and budget allocation in particulate matter projects, this research examined various features of projects with larger budget allocation. This paper focused on the performance indicator used in managing projects, the field, and the characteristic of projects through the ANOVA and Chisquare analysis. As a result, field factors can affect the budget of particulate matter response projects. This paper also found that there are relationships between field factors and performance indicator factors. Specifically, the transportation_road project which showed low performance with rich financial sources mainly used output indicators. On the other hand, industry projects which had a good performance result in reducing particulate matter emission with a small budget used both output and outcome indicators, not focusing on only output indicator. This gives implications for performance management and for budget allocation with performance information. Simultaneously, this paper showed that the performance achievement rate used by the government in the evaluation of each project did not relate to the budget. This foundation means that the performance evaluation tool the government used was not so effective. The Korean government needs to improve performance management and evaluation, thus encouraging use of outcome performance indicators could better align with desired goals.
This research had limitations in gathering performance results from a whole field approach, not from each project. The limitation is natural given that tracking real performance results from each and every individual project is beyond the reach of any government. To verify the cause and effect between performance indicators and real results, further studies are needed to give more detailed implications to governments.1. INTRODUCTION
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
3. DATA
4. METHODOLOGY AND HYPOTHESIS DEVELOPMENT
5. DATA ANALYSIS
6. CONCLUSION
7. BIBLIOGRAPHYmasterpublishedSoyoung UH