The changing dynamics of regionalism in South Korea's elections

One of the most persistent areas of discussion regarding South Korea's party and election systems is the continued elevation of regional personalities over political institutions. We seek to pour new wine into old bottles, however, by challenging a seldom‐considered assumption in Korean studies; that regionalism has exerted constant pressures across regime, province, and personality. There is a void in studying how transition to democracy has affected the dominance of personality‐based regionalism in Korean politics. We investigate democratization's impact on this phenomenon by examining the provincial distribution of legislative and presidential voting from 1971–2002. We employ a new indicator for personality‐based disproportionality, apply it to election outcomes at the provincial level, and find that the electoral impact of regionalism has changed over time across regimes, provinces, and political personalities. We find that regional voting disproportionality 1) increased immediately after transition; 2) has varied depending on personality and type of election; 3) is indeed low in provinces traditionally labeled as neutral; and 4) increased in the 2000 legislative election while declining in the 2002 presidential election.     

An evaluation scheme for product–service system models: development of evaluation criteria and case studies

A product–service system (PSS) integrates products and services to fulfill customer needs and create sustainability. PSS evaluation requires the use of diverse criteria because PSSs are complex systems with multiple stakeholders and perspectives. This paper proposes an evaluation scheme for PSS models that consists of a set of 94 evaluation criteria and an evaluation procedure. The proposed set of criteria encompasses both provider and customer perspectives, all of the 3P (profitability, planet, and people) values and various PSS lifecycle phases, whereas existing studies only partially cover these aspects of PSS. The proposed set serves as an evaluation criterion repository, and users can easily identify the criteria relevant to the evaluation targets. Using the proposed set is more efficient than starting from scratch. The proposed evaluation scheme can be used either to compare different PSS models or to evaluate a single model. Case studies show that the proposed scheme can sufficiently evaluate both existing and newly launched PSS models as well as models under development. The proposed scheme is expected to serve as an efficient and effective aid for practitioners in PSS development.     

Characteristics of random responders in a financial risk-tolerance questionnaire

Journal of Financial Services Marketing - The possibility of random response occurring, which can result in Type II errors, is possible whenever a financial risk-tolerance questionnaire is...     

Serious leisure profiles and well-being of older Korean adults

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between different levels of serious leisure qualities and the happiness, health perceptions, and life satisfaction of older Korean adults who are members of community-based, sports clubs. A cluster analysis was used in order to examine patterns of serious leisure qualities (e.g. perseverance, significant effort, career development, identification and unique ethos). The core devotees who identified higher levels of serious leisure qualities reported experiencing higher levels of happiness, health perceptions, and life satisfaction when compared to the moderate devotees. The results of this study suggest that serious leisure serves as a catalyst for health and well-being which can, in turn, contribute to successful ageing.     

Development of a Scale for Tourism Facilitators

The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a scale of tourism facilitators that may play a significant role in participating in tourism activities. A scale of tourism facilitators was developed directly from the results in this study. One of the most important findings is that the tourism facilitator scale shows relatively acceptable measurement properties and reasonable levels of fit. The investigation of internal consistency and the CFA of the scale confirm the sufficient reliability and validity of the proposed model. The results also provide evidence that the three dimensions of tourism facilitators were negatively related to the three dimensions of tourism constraints, except for the relationship between intrapersonal facilitators and interpersonal constraints. Future studies should examine other countries to validate a more stable tourism facilitator scale and its relationships with related variables. The further testing of the concept of tourism facilitators can determine the role of facilitators at different stages of the destination decision-making process. The findings also provided preliminary evidence supporting the feasibility and value of using the new instrument as well as its relevance to both fundamental and applied research in investigating tourist behavior.     

Trade Liberalisation and Poverty Reduction in Vietnam

This paper investigates the impacts of trade liberalisation on poverty reduction in Vietnam during the period of economic reform. Using a combined approach dealing with four transmitting channels from trade to poverty, the major findings are summarised as follows. First, Vietnam's trade liberalisation has fostered economic growth, which has helped to raise per capita GDP and reduce poverty. Second, trade liberalisation has directly benefited the poor through creating pro‐poor employment and raising wages. Third, another impact of trade liberalisation on poverty is income and substitution effects associated with reduced domestic prices of importables and increased domestic prices of exportables such as coffee and rice. Fourth, trade liberalisation has indirectly benefited the poor because it raises government revenue, which enhances the government's ability to subsidise the poor. Finally, although the poverty rate in Vietnam has been reduced impressively, there is an increasing disparity between urban and rural areas and, among the latter, concern does exist regarding ethnic minorities.     

The global financial crisis and protectionism: Substitution from tariffs to non-tariff measures

This study empirically investigates the relationships between tariffs and non-tariff measures before and after the global financial crisis (GFC). The panel analysis is based on traded products of 70 countries from 1997 to 2015. For developed countries, we find that tariffs and non-tariff measures were complementary before the crisis, but they became substitutional afterward. We do not find such shift for developing countries. We also run the analysis by income levels and by types of products and observe differential effects of the GFC on the relationship between the two trade policies.