Abstract
Since the inauguration of the government-led five year economic plans in the 1960s, Korea has achieved remarkable economic development. Korea’s economic strategy, known as ‘The Miracle on the Han River’, focused on heavy and chemical industries such as ship building and petrochemicals and was based on resource intensive urbanization. This rapid urban development caused a series of problems, such as over-development in urban areas, bottlenecks in utilities, and environmental degradation. Nevertheless, the Korean government has recently moved toward deregulation of the greenbelts of major city areas. Since very few studies have analyzed the urban land use economic efficiency (ULUEE) in Korea, this paper assesses the feasibility of recent deregulation policy concerning the greenbelts utilizing the sequential slack-based measure (SSBM) model under environmental constraints across 16 South Korean cities from 2006 to 2013. Our research makes three significant contributions to urbanization research. First, this paper uses an SSBM model to analyze the dynamic changes of urban land use economic efficiency in Korea at the regional level; Second, this paper analyzes factors influencing ULUEE in Korea, and the feasibility of the deregulation policies on the greenbelts; Third, this paper suggests more performance-oriented policy alternatives to improve the ULUEE and implement sustainable greenbelt management.
Highlights
Ignoring undesirable outputs could result in overestimation of land use efficiency, and we will adopt land use efficiency with undesirable outputs using the sequential slack-based measure (SSBM) model
We empirically tested the dynamic trend of urban land use economic efficiency (ULUEE) and its determinant factors with various constraints under Korean government policies, in 16 cities and provinces across the South Korean peninsula from 2006 to 2013
This paper found that economic development in Korea promoted land use efficiency from diverse perspectives
Summary
As urbanization proceeds rapidly in most developing countries, the selective concentration policies in strategic areas create excess demand for land due to the complex yet unexpected expansion of the urbanization process. This unbalanced urbanization may create great inefficiency in land use [3,4]. Due to this fact, the Korean government uses the greenbelts of the city boundaries to accommodate the excess demand for land use. The Korean government has taken measures to transform the greenbelt regions into built-up land
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