Abstract
The eco-industrial park (EIP), which aims to minimize by-product and unused energy via reuse and recycling within the industrial complex, offers an innovative pathway to realize regional eco-industrial development. As an environmental, as well as business, innovation, the EIP enables changing the perception of industries and create new business values via the whole supply chain, but such evidences have been less reported to date. As one of the world famous promoter on EIPs, the Republic of Korea (ROK) initiated a national EIP project to enhance its competitiveness and solve environmental problems. While the existing literature reviewed and highlighted its economic outcomes in terms of direct performances of firms within the project, the indirect impacts on the supply chain of national economy were less investigated. Within this circumstance, this study performed a first attempt to apply an input-output analysis (IOA) to investigate the effects of the EIP project on the whole economic system of Korea, via an exogenous specification of the EIP sector in the input-output tables (IOTs). General economic effects in terms of value-added change, employment generation, as well as specific effects like the inducement effects and effects of supply shortage and price pervasiveness were evaluated based on the IOA approach (including demand-driven, supply-driven, and Leontief price models). Results highlighted that, from the supply chain perspective, implementing the EIP project made production and value-added grow by around 1264 billion KRW and 272 billion KRW, respectively (with a unit induction coefficient of 1.6201 and 0.3489 for production and value-added). While generating a direct employment around 1000, an indirect employment was also created of over 5000 persons in the whole supply chain (with an employment inducement effect of 6.4512 persons per 1 billion KRW investment). The production shortage cost from 1 KRW of supply failure is 1.1230 KRW. In summary, EIP was proved to be not environmentally friendly, but also a driver to improve the overall economic performance of upstream and downstream industries in the whole supply chain. As a first attempt to link IOA with EIP, the results of this paper are expected to enlighten policy-makers to forward continued improvement on EIP promotion and combine the EIP idea within national economic system reform and planning.
Highlights
The green growth of industries is one critical issue for sustainable development goals (SDGs) [1,2], industrialization and urbanization usual interact
This study innovatively evaluated the role of eco-industrial park (EIP) on Korea’s national economy by applying an input-output analysis (IOA)-based evaluation, including the demand-driven model, inter-industry linkage effects, the supply-driven model, and the Leontief price model
Except for our inter-industry linkage effects analysis, the EIP sector was treated as exogenous to evaluate the net effects by changes in investment, supply, or price in each sector
Summary
The green growth of industries is one critical issue for sustainable development goals (SDGs) [1,2], industrialization and urbanization usual interact. Rapid economic growth, industrialization, enhanced living quality, as well as the underlying resources and energy consumption, pure technological innovations are unlikely to entirely offset the environmental impacts generated, e.g., it was estimated that even with the best projections of technological solutions in the future, it was unlikely to achieve the optimistic 50% CO2 mitigation target, due to sharp increasing demand driven by economic growth globally and rapid urbanization procedures [6,7] With this circumstance, it urgently requires new and systematic solutions apart from pure technical options to push forward sustainability with consideration of the combined challenges including, but not limited to, optimal resource efficiency options, reduced ecological footprints, and fighting climate change. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: after this introduction section, Section 2 has an overview on Korea’s EIP program, as well as the related economic and environmental outcomes; Section 3 describes the detailed technical information on the IOA approach employed in this paper; Section 4 presents the analytical results and the related discussions; and, Section 5 draws the conclusions and critical policy implications
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