Problems of the Wholesale Distribution Structure of Fishery Products and Suggestions for Improvement: A Focus on the Analysis of Transaction Relationship in Garak Wholesale Market

Abstract

Purpose The competitiveness of the public wholesale market in South Korea, which should play a central role in distributing fishery products, is gradually decreasing. There are multiple opinions that this decline in competitiveness is due to the irrational distribution structure in the wholesale market. Accordingly, in this study tried to investigate the normality of the current fishery distribution structure by analyzing the transaction relationship between the shippers and intermediary wholesalers of fishery products in Garak Market. Design/Methodology/Approach Focusing on typical cases at Garak Wholesale Market, the transaction relationship was analyzed for the number and volume of transactions between the shippers and intermediate wholesalers of 12 major items. In addition, regardless of item, the transaction relationship between shippers and wholesalers was analyzed by transaction methods. Findings This analysis revealed that there were frequent cases of suspicious monopoly transactions between shippers and intermediate wholesalers, and regardless of item, there were also a number of cases in which the multi-item quantity of a single shipper was entirely supplied to a specific intermediate wholesaler. As a result of comparing these to cases in Japan, these problems in the fishery distribution of the wholesale market in South Korea was found to be due to a distribution structure that does not reflect the characteristics of fishery products. Research Implications This study has implications in that it demonstrated empirically the problems of fishery distribution within the existing wholesale market through quantitative analysis, and suggests improvement plans based on this result.