This paper dealt with the Korean manpower policy in science and technology, focusing on the contents and tools of the Special Act and its Master Plans. After briefly introducing the historical development of the Korean manpower policy from the 1960s to the present, it discussed and analyzed the Special Act and Plans from the framework of personnel development, distribution, utilization and infrastructure. Korea’s science and technology manpower policy has focused on fostering and supplying manpower in line with the country’s industrial growth strategy. In the early stage of industrial development during the 1960s and 1980s, government research institutes were direct and effective tools for nurturing S&T manpower. Since the 1990s, the importance of university research has increased. The government fostered graduate research manpower through the research-oriented university policy of the BK21 program. After the IMF financial crisis in 1997, the tendency of students to avoid careers in science and technology led to enacting the Special Act (2004) governing the field of S&T human resources. The Special Act has contributed to leveling up the university education system in science and engineering and sophisticated the policy to include entrepreneurship training, spin-off startups, industry-university cooperation, and offering degree programs. The Special Act and the regularly revised Master Plans have been essential tools in systematically managing the science and technology manpower policies of the Korean government.
The purpose of this study is to examine the unique characteristics of the Korean academic system with regard to brain circulation, with a specific emphasis on the influence of overseas-trained academics on research activities within the Korean academic system. We have analyzed the statistical data on individual characteristics and performances of 48,499 Korean academics in science and engineering. We have examined the results at both the system and individual levels within the broader context of the macro characteristics of the Korean academic system. Our analysis reveals that the total number of domestically-trained academics exceeds the number of overseas-trained academics. However, in terms of research funding, overseas-trained academics tend to receive more funding than domestically-trained academics. Furthermore, after controlling other factors such as funding, personal attributes, and environmental factors, our analysis demonstrates that overseas training has a significant and favorable impact on the publication of internationally renowned journals. As such, the presence of overseas returnees has been essential for the effective functioning of the Korean academic system in the global research network and for conducting high-quality academic research. Therefore, the advantages of dependence on scientific core countries such as the US for overseas training have persisted. Nevertheless, upon scrutinizing the group of recently appointed 5,806 academics exclusively, we have discovered that junior academics who received their education domestically exhibit sufficient academic proficiency compared to their colleagues educated overseas. This observation highlights the potential for the Korean academic system to evolve into a self-sustaining system.
With the advent of the ‘4th Industrial Revolution’, digitalization using AI (Artificial Intelligence), big data, IoT (Internet of Things), cloud computing and mobile is accelerating across all industries and global companies have fundamentally reorganized customer experiences, business models, and operations centering on digital transformation. Business innovation drives productivity improvement, process simplification, price, competitiveness and sustainable expansion. Whether digital transformation will be necessary for the current industrial environment is no longer important, and how quickly companies achieve digitalization has emerged as the utmost crucial element in industrial continuity. As non-face-to-face and remote technologies have begun in earnest, and accelerated in the pharmaceutical industry. They are looking for ways to provide value, generate profits, improve efficiency, and sustain the future. Compared to other industries, the pharmaceutical-related sectors have shown high interest in digital transformation especially to reduce costs and meet the challenge of delivering products during the pandemic environment.
Over the past few decades, globalization has been shifting economic power upward to transnational actors on the one hand, and downward to subnational or regional spaces on the other. This phenomenon has resulted in the centrality of territorially delimited subnational regions acting as critical loci of economic governance within a complex and globally distributed value chain of trade and service flows. Within this broader context of industrial restructuring are economic regions that span national borders in their collective assets. The paper focuses on investigating the economic competitiveness and productivity of cross-border (or binational) economic regions. Using the conceptual framework of economic clusters, an econometric model that measures proxies of geographic proximity of firms in the life sciences cluster, and a new binational economic model, the paper examines the key characteristics, potentials and constraints of economic competitiveness and productivity in a cross-border region comprising counties in Western New York and regional municipalities in Southern Ontario. The findings demonstrate the direct and indirect benefits of closer cross-border economic cooperation. The paper then concludes with some policy observations about leveraging cross-border economic clusters for strategic industrial cooperation.
The increasing cost, and demand for, household energy has increased attention to the phenomena of energy burdens. Despite this increased attention, a lack of consensus remains in pinpointing the strongest predictors, and geographic differences, that exist within the energy ecosystem. This study addresses this gap by utilizing a series of dummy variable regressions across cities, suburbs, and rural areas within Erie County, New York—a county noted to have particularly high energy burdens. Specifically, three types of predictor sets were incorporated into the methodology: a set of socioeconomic variables, physical variables, and a combination of both variable sets. The results of this study suggest that cities tend to have the highest electricity burdens. Despite the aging infrastructure in Erie County, high energy burdens were driven primarily by socioeconomic factors such as housing cost burden and poverty status. Lastly, this study explores various planning and policy implications Erie County can utilize to reduce energy burdens. In turn, this study highlights the importance of focusing policy efforts on existing social service programs to provide support to the region’s neediest households.
This study investigates the productivity of Indonesian social scientists during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a particular concentration on their contributions to COVID-19 prevention and management. By categorizing social science research according to themes such as authors' gender, authors' institution of origin, forms of collaboration, and journal quality, this study examines the patterns and factors that influence research output. Using information from the Scopus database, 1,071 journal articles were analyzed in total. The findings indicate that collaborations with foreign researchers considerably improve productivity and publication quality, with Malaysian and Australian institutions serving as the most active partners. Nevertheless, there are gender disparities, as female authors write and are cited less frequently than male authors. The study stresses the importance of increasing international collaboration among Indonesian authors and implementing affirmative action policies to support and empower female researchers. This study contributes to the existing body of knowledge by providing policymakers, funding agencies, and academic institutions with recommendations for fostering a more inclusive and influential research environment in Indonesia.