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China, Japan, and Korea have signed free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations with many countries since the late 1990s. This study analyzes the determinants of staging categories for tariff elimination in FTA negotiations of these East Asian countries by using an ordered probit model. The two key findings are (a) each country had set up a product scope for tariff elimination and exclusion list efficiently to maximize its national economic interests, and (b) the staging categories were determined by product-level competitiveness, industrial characteristics, and political factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the Korea-Japan free trade agreement (FTA) model. Topics mentioned include the labor market, marginal productivity, and wage rate of the two countries, the opposition of farmers to FTA, and the effects of the aging population in Japan to its economic condition. Also mentioned are the exchange rate that was determined by exports and imports in trade and the rate of return (ROR) by two countries.

This paper constructs a new dataset of the industry-specific real effective exchange rate, based on the producer price indices, for Japan, China, and Korea on a monthly basis from January 2001 to February 2013 in order to provide a better indicator for export price competitiveness. By conducting simulation analysis, we found that Korean electrical machinery firms substantially improved their cost competitiveness by lowering their production costs during the Korean won appreciation period, while Japanese firms' large plant investment caused by management misjudgments led to excessive production capacity, which resulted in the deterioration of Japanese export competitiveness. A structural vector autoregression analysis also reveals that industry differences of cost competitiveness as well as nominal exchange rate changes have significant impact on export performances of Japan and Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has three objectives: i) to empirically examine labor market transitions in deindustrializing Asian economies; ii) to study the character of labor market risks and how these risks are shifting by gender, by education level, and by age in the transitional period; and iii) to rethink the commonly accepted assumptions that deindustrialization and globalization are the main causes of new labor market risks and, thus propose the possibility of institutional legacy as an important factor for such risk shifts. This study focuses on the labor market risks in the Republic of Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. Three steps are taken in this inquiry. First, this study commences by empirically examining the three labor market changes mentioned above. Second, it challenges the idea of the emergence of 'new risks,' arguing instead for the concept of 'risk shift': the feature of risk shifting to different demographic groups. Lastly, with the empirical evidence already used, this paper discusses whether deindustrialization or globalization is a sufficient cause for risk shifts in deindustrializing Asian economies, proposing that institutional legacy may be an important factor in risk shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large areas of Northeast Asia experienced drought in 1939. Agricultural production in Korea decreased significantly, but the drought did not cause famine in Japan despite its dependence on rice imports from Korea. The paper analyses the impact of the 1939 drought on the markets for rice and electricity in Japan. The authorities were ill-prepared for such a disaster but willing to use it for the purpose of covering for other problems. The drought thus accelerated the move of Japan's economic system towards a managed economy. A lower total rainfall in Japan in 1940 did not generate similar problems, suggesting that the broader political, economic, and social context is crucial to the identification of short-term climatic fluctuations as crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the “varieties of capitalism” debate, scholars have paid considerable attention to the question of whether Korea and Japan have left behind their interventionist political economy for neo-liberal reform. In this paper, we re-examine the scholarly consensus that Korea has become a neo-liberal state, while Japan has not changed much. On the basis of our comparison of the extent of the two countries' neo-liberal reforms using the “business systems framework” developed by Witt, we demonstrate that neo-liberal reforms observed in Korea and Japan are not substantially different enough to warrant the view that the two countries have taken divergent paths of institutional development. With this finding, we call for further empirical study, including the development and use of more qualitative data. We suggest that the future direction research should take on this issue in order to make theoretical contributions to the existing literature on institutional change and continuity in “non-liberal” capitalist countries. We do this by offering some methods in which future researchers could identify necessary and sufficient causes of Korea's and Japan's neo-liberal (or non-neo-liberal) shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the Korean biotechnology sector with an analytical framework of National Innovation System (NIS). We examine whether newly industrializing economies (NIEs) can catch up with advanced economies in newly-emerging, knowledge-intensive industries such as biotechnology. We demonstrate that Korea is emerging as a key player in the global biotechnology scene in terms of R&D activities, catching up with other advanced countries, such as Japan, and keeping pace with regional competitors like Taiwan, Singapore and China. While the substantial increase in innovation capabilities lends support to the plausibility of the catching-up view, we also find that improvements and adaptations need to be made in transferring knowledge effectively from public to private sector and in commercializing biotechnology with the institutional support of private funding. Our study highlights the mechanisms by which collective competence of managing knowledge creation and diffusion is facilitated in a developing economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Singapore has witnessed rapid urban development in the last thirty years. Its landscape has changed from one of slums and squatters in the immediate post-war years to a city of gardens and high-rise high-density housing. The concept of a 'garden city' was introduced to guidethe development of a city-state with abundant greenery. In the process, many parks and gardens were created including park connectors which are green linkages between parks and other land uses. This paper presents the findings of an ongoing research into park connectors. It reports on that part of the survey results which examine the views ofresidents towards nature provision in park connectors and suggest some design options to enhance the planning of park connectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the politics of ‘defamilialization of care’ in four familialist countries – Italy, Japan, Korea and Spain – during the past 15 years. By ‘defamilialization of care’, we refer to those public policies, which aim at reducing the care responsibility of the family – both for the young and the old. We build upon the existing literature on new social risks by highlighting the role of those macro-political institutions such as electoral systems and government types in order to demonstrate that there are two very different types of politics of defamilialization: (1) election-oriented and (2) problem-oriented. We attribute different policy outcomes in the four familialist countries to their specific institutional configurations rather than to partisan government composition or different cultural orientations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article focuses on the Japan's persistant colonial rule in Korea with the example of soy sauce food industry. The large scale commercial Japanese methods in the production of soy sauce changes the food habits of koreans. An encroachment of foreign culinary trend, reassersion of of Korea's own culinary heritage and the economical affluence generated with the soy sauce food industry are discussed.