Article
Metropolitan Governance Matters: The Low Economic Performance of Metropolitan Cities in South Korea
Sung-Bae Kim1
1Sung-Bae Kim is a professor in the Department of Public Administration at Soongsil University. Email:
graal@ssu.ac.kr. This work was partly supported by the Human Resource Development Program of the Korea Institute of Energy Technology Evaluation and Planning (KETEP) grant (#2014010200660) funded by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy. This article is a revised version of the paper presented at the Regional Studies Association (RSA) annual conference 2018. I thank Anna M. Hersperger and Federico Martellozzo for their comments at the conference, and three anonymous reviewers for their comments. I also thank Kim, Ji-Su and Lee, Myeonghee for exceptional research assistance. Any problems are mine alone.
© Copyright 2019 Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Received: Feb 10, 2019; Revised: Feb 23, 2019; Revised: Mar 15, 2019; Accepted: Mar 18, 2019
Published Online: Apr 30, 2019
Abstract
This study undertakes an empirical analysis to identify the determinants of the low economic performance of major metropolitan cities in Korea. Using panel data of the metropolitan cities between 2000 to 2016, I carried out ageneralized least square estimation and obtained the following results. First, traditional explanatory variables such as capital investment, labor force, and R&D investments are highly significant with positive expected signs. Second, nationallevel governance arrangements for the metropolitan cities have negative impacts on the economic performance of the cities. Last, the impacts of subnational governance arrangements on economic performance are not entirely conclusive. These pieces of evidence suggest that improving the economic performance of the metropolitan cities may require a restructuring of the current framework of metropolitan governance.
Keywords: metropolitan governance; economic performance; metropolitan cities; panel data analysis
