earticle

영어

This study deals with regional specialization and the creative industries in domestic metropolitan cities of Korea in terms of creative employees and further drawing some policy implications of structural adjustment based on the theory of Richard Florida arguing that fast-growing city-regions are those that manage to attract and keep creative works. His view implies that the workers in creative industries as one of the super-creative core in his classification may be the most decisive factor among others for their development in each region. The policy implemented since 1999 in Korea to set creative industry clusters in the metropolitan areas has been criticized in that it has not so much been effective in economic sense. An aim of this study is to investigate the growth of creative industry workers in domestic metropolitan areas from 1999 to 2005 using location quotients and shift-share analysis. The results show that some structural adjustment may be needed to develop existing creative industries in terms of competitive advantage. Also the Florida's theory implies that the regional policy makers may need to develop infrastructure to meet the needs for the creative worker to keep and attract them in future growth of the regions in the short run at least. This article has some limitations in that other important factors including employees to affect the economic growth of creative industries in the cities and the implications of this paper would be different with more adequate data and including other factors.