Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of education and R&D investment on regional economic growth in South Korea. We develop a simultaneous model of production, human capital accumulation, migration, population and physical capital investment of two regions: the Seoul Metropolitan Area and the rest of Korea. We decompose the regional growth path into a quality path and a quantity path to identify how regional economies grow and run simulations to evaluate alternative policies in terms of effectiveness and adaptability. The impact of education and R&D investment on regional growth in the rest of Korea is only 22.3% of that in the Seoul Metropolitan Area due to lower elasticity values of young in-migrants with respect to the investment in the rest of Korea. An enhanced efficiency of regional human capital accumulation is effective and adaptable to alleviate regional economic disparity.

Highlights

  • As reported by the TIMES of London in 2010, universities in Scotland would confront a brain drain unless the investment on higher education is properly addressed

  • We develop a simultaneous model of production, human capital accumulation, migration, population and physical capital investment of two regions

  • The purpose of this paper was to examine the impact of education and R&D investment on regional economic growth in South Korea

Read more

Summary

Introduction

As reported by the TIMES of London in 2010, universities in Scotland would confront a brain drain unless the investment on higher education is properly addressed. The government has focused on allocating more resources to the ROK’s higher education institutions (HEIs) and developing industrial parks in the ROK since the 1990s Despite these efforts of the Korean government, human capital, as well as financial capital, is concentrated in the SMA. Even the Korean government’s policy to expand investment in the ROK’s HEIs and industrial parks since the 1990s failed to narrow the regional economic disparity between the SMA and the ROK. While previous works have focused on the analysis of the overall effect of intellectual capital investments, distinguishing the two types of growth paths can be useful in identifying how lagging regions economically grow [3,4,5,6].

Literature Review
Model and Variables
Estimation and Simulation Results
Findings
Conclusions

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call

Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.