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The real costs of trade, the transport and other costs of doing business internationally, are very important determinants of a country's ability to participate fully in the world economy. Remoteness and poor transport and communications infrastructure isolate countries, inhibiting their participation in global production networks. This paper investigates the dependence of transport costs on geography and infrastructure It shows that infrastructure is quantitatively important in determining transport costs, and improvements in infrastructure can dramatically increase trade flows. It also finds that the low level of Northeast Asian countries' trade flows is largely due to poor infrastructure. Competition among countries in East Asia to maintain or become a logistic hub in the region is severe. This is reflected in the competition to build or expand airports and seaports in the region. Competing countries need to find ways of cooperating to achieve an efficient resource allocation in the region as a whole.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of independence principle of refund guarantees (RGs) and how to make the best of an arbitration clause in the guarantees so that a Korean shipbuilder, a guarantor and an export credit agency (ECA) may possibly protect themselves from buyers’ unlawful demand.

This paper firstly introduces a brief elucidation about RG and the concept of independence principle. By way of presenting factual backgrounds, legal and policy evaluation and analyses, this paper covered all issues and disputes arising out of one shipbuilding contract and the independent RG drawn from the shipbuilding contract, through in-depth cases studies of a judicial case on the matter of independence principle of RG between the beneficiary (the buyer or its assignee) and the guarantor reviewed by an English court, an arbitration case regarding whether the beneficiary (the buyer or its assignee) has any right of refund in the event of the acceptance of a repudiatory breach by the applicant (the builder) in the London Maritime Arbitrators Association, and the beneficiary (the buyer or its assignee)’s appeal to an English court against the award and a judicial case reviewing whether the guarantor has right of reimbursement in accordance with the terms of the export bond insurance with the Korean ECA.

While most RGs, in practice, are drawn as an independent guarantee which is payable on call without any evidence of default, there is another payment scheme in RGs, such as payment upon the submission of an arbitral award which may enhance the application of RGs in shipbuilding contracts. The paper suggested that under these circumstances, Korean builders may opt to make their shipbuilding contract be governed by Korean laws, with the Korean Commercial Arbitration Board as a competent arbitral jurisdiction and forum as far as possible.

This paper proposes prudent approaches and considerations in the issuance and application of RGs which are independent from shipbuilding contracts. The hope is to increase awareness in the utility of arbitration system as well as for fiduciary Korean banks and ECAs to play a more pivotal role in guiding shipbuilding industry stakeholders.

This study aims to provide the main contents of the revision of the 2023 OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and suggest implications for the Korean government and multinational enterprises.

Following the brief history of the revision of OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, this study reviews and evaluates major substantive and procedural revisions of the 2023 OECD Guidelines, and then suggests countermeasures for Korean government and businesses.

The most significant substantive change of the 2023 revision is that expectations for environmental due diligence and disclosure obligations, including climate change and biodiversity, for multinational enterprises have been expanded and strengthened. Regarding procedural changes, the biggest change is the introduction of a basis rule for the National Contact Points for Responsible Business Conduct (NCPs for RBC) to judge each issue and a rule that the final statement must include follow-up details and deadlines, which is expected to strengthen the effectiveness of the NCP dispute resolution mechanism.

This study is the first academic paper to introduce major substantive and procedural revisions to the 2023 OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises in Korea. This study also provides implications for the Korean government and companies following the 2023 revised OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises as follows. First, the Korean government must establish a public–private partnership to closely communicate to prevent Korean companies from being harmed by failing to meet strengthening international Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) standards. In addition, Korean government should actively participate in ESG-related international forums, including the OECD, and strive to reflect the needs and interests of Korean companies. Second, the Korean NCP should strengthen its activities to prevent potential damage by expanding education and promotions for Korean businesses on related overseas legislative trends and NCP dispute case studies so that Korean companies can effectively deal with the strengthened ESG standards. Third, Korean multinational enterprises should preemptively establish an advanced ESG management system to seize new opportunities in the global supply chain previously concentrated in China and India in the process of reorganizing global supply chains according to the trend of strengthening ESG standards and the US value alliance strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to utilize the concept of arbitration by subrogation as a means to increase recoveries of indemnities paid out to exporters or any financial institutions by K-SURE, an export credit agency of Korea, against possible non-payment or breach of obligations from the buyer or the buyer’s country. It looks into the possibility of K-SURE and KCAB reactivating its 2004 MOU to give more jurisdictional protection to K-SURE’s indemnities recovery transactions.

This paper first introduces a brief elucidation about export insurance provided by K-SURE and the necessity of arbitration in the export insurance, and a summary of a subrogation arbitration case referred to the KCAB by K-SURE in 2005. Cognizant of the 2004 MOU between K-SURE and KCAB, as well as the foreign and domestic developments in arbitration, the paper then analyzes legal principles of subrogation by insurer, as well as domestic and overseas precedents on the matters of assignment of claim and arbitration by subrogation.

While it appears that there is still no universally recognized authority nor established court precedents applying arbitration by subrogation, the authors discovered that similar to Korea, most of leading courts in the world have consistently held that the assignee can request and be requested for arbitration pursuant to the arbitration agreement contained in the assigned contract. The paper concludes that the K-SURE now can be admitted as a party having proper standing in the arbitration proceedings so long as the specific claim right under the contract which includes the arbitration agreement is assigned to the K-SURE.

This paper suggests a possible plan to increase recoveries in export insurance. The outcome of the research is expected to enhance the arbitration system on the back of increasing numbers of arbitration related to export insurance, to improve the balance sheet of K-SURE and ultimately, to help the Korean economy by collecting export insurance recoveries which will lead to saving Korean people’s tax.

This paper presents a pop-up technique based on origamic architecture as a technological design solution for post-disaster temporary shelter systems. First of all, the concepts of disaster and post-disaster are briefly introduced, and the roles and needs of post-disaster temporary shelter systems, particularly in emergency periods, are reviewed. Second, pop-up techniques based on origamic architecture are briefly discussed. Third, a formal language for opening the cards of origamic architecture is introduced, out of which a geometric elasticity has been developed. With the language, a variety of flexible and expandable designs for shelter structures can be generated by incorporating different pop-up techniques. Finally, a prototype shelter has been constructed to demonstrate the adaptability and sustainability of the shelter within the local environment and the affected society, considering portability, low-cost, and easy in assembling by any unskilled person.

Mobile social network games (mSNGs) are gaining increasing popularity recently. Many of the games are marketed using the brand pages on social network services including Facebook. The purpose of this paper is to identify the characteristics of the posts on the brand pages that affect the reaction of users.

Four independent variables were tested for their influence on user reaction: informativeness, structure, call for action, and the type of reward. In total, 439 posts on the brand pages of two mobile game companies on Facebook were manually collected. The hypotheses were tested using multiple regression analysis.

The characteristics of the brand pages appeared to have significant impact on the users’ reaction. Overall, being informative, calling for action, and providing content-related (game-related) rewards have significant and positive impact on the reaction of users. Using only texts or embedding videos or hyperlinks in the posts has either negative or no significant impact on the reaction of users.

The literature review shows that not many empirical studies have been conducted so far about the brand pages of mSNGs. Therefore, this study contributes to the understanding of users’ reaction on the brand pages for mSNGs, and how companies should manage their communication effort on the pages.

The purpose of this research, is to develop a nano composite deposition system (NCDS) to fabricate three dimensional functional nano composite parts.

The NCDS is a hybrid system in which material removal process by mechanical micro machining and/or the deposition process is combined.

Hybrid RP technology showed higher precision than those made by casting or deposition process. Tensile strength of the hydroxyapatite‐acrylic composite was about four times higher than that of resin‐only specimen while MWCNT composite did not show much improvement.

The paper illustrates new approaches for rapid prototyping techniques with various materials and high precision.

The team members’ expertise has been shown to increase team effectiveness when it is actively coordinated. While in face-to-face teams such expertise coordination unfolds through direct interaction, expertise coordination in dispersed teams is unlikely to evolve automatically. In this context, shared leadership, that is, the distribution of leadership influence across multiple team members is argued to serve as initiating mechanism for expertise coordination.

Existing research has theoretically modeled conditional correlations between the long-term interest rates as a function of macroeconomic variable. In line with it, the purpose of this paper is to explore whether conditional correlations can be a new signal to predict recessions. Furthermore, this paper also tries to investigate among the four factors – the time difference of the beginning and the end of recessions, financial integration (FI), and trade integration (TI) – which factors drive the direction of change in conditional correlations. Finally, this paper is to explain the implication for Korea trade.

This study uses a probit regression model for 33 country during the period from 1972 to 2015. To measure the time-varying interest rates conditional correlations, a VAR(1)-DBEKK-GARCH(1,1) model is adopted due to its statistical advantages. Furthermore, the authors also construct the four measures – time difference of the beginning of recessions (BEG), time difference of the end of recessions (END), FI, and TI. The authors first study the predictive power of correlations in both in and out-samples test, and study which factors determine the different behavior of interest rate co-movements using the four measures.

The empirical results show that the conditional correlations between the long-term interest rates of the USA and individual countries contain information about recessions a few quarters ahead which term spreads of neither individual countries nor the USA conveyed in. However, there is a heterogeneity of the significance and direction of interest rate correlations. A further research reveals that especially the heterogeneous degree of TI leads to the different overlapped recession period of individual countries with the USA, resulting in heterogeneous behavior of interest rates among countries.

As a limitation of this paper, the forecasting power of interest rate correlations is not always significant in all countries. Despite this, the study has a profound implication that for those countries where the US accounts for the high proportion of trade, increase in conditional correlations can be a signal for future recessions. Especially, given a considerable portion of trade in GDP and the more sensitive trade activity of Korea to a contagious recession than a domestic recession, the conditional correlation measure is particularly useful for Korean policy makers.

Although many papers model interest rate co-movement as a function of macroeconomic condition, this paper provides the first evidence to show interest rate co-movement precede the macro shocks empirically. Furthermore, this paper determines the precise channel through which TI affects the time-varying behavior of interest rate co-movements before recessions.

This paper aims to improve customer knowledge management practices in industrial firms by examining the role of knowledge integration mechanisms (KIMs) and customer-oriented reward systems in non-marketing managers’ use of customer information.

Cross-sectional survey data were collected from 221 R & D and manufacturing managers from large, Finnish industrial companies. Ordinary least squares regression with bootstrap procedures was used to test the hypotheses.

The use of KIMs mediates the positive effect of customer-oriented reward systems on non-marketing managers’ use of customer information. However, non-marketing managers’ previous work experience in sales and marketing negatively moderates the effect of customer-oriented reward systems on the use of customer information. The use of knowledge integration systems mediates this moderation effect.

This paper provides empirical evidence concerning the antecedents of successful customer knowledge transfer from sales and marketing to R & D and manufacturing. The findings imply that non-marketing managers with T-shaped skills (previous work experience also in sales and marketing) are unlikely to increase their use of KIMs if they are exposed to customer-oriented reward systems. Hence, broadening employees’ knowledge base substitutes for using customer-oriented reward systems as a tool for improving customer information use.

Building on the research on customer knowledge management, marketing’s cross-functional relationships and the motivation for knowledge transfer, this paper increases our understanding of how to develop organizational support for customer knowledge transfer. The authors consider both the impact of reward systems and their interaction with employees’ knowledge and skills.