earticle

영어

Small and medium-sized cities charge an important role in provincial areas which help to strengthen the competitiveness. In spite of efforts to keeping the balance between Seoul Metropolitan Area(SMA) and provinces, there has not yet been any significant effects. Because, there are lots of problems such as insufficient consideration of local conditions, uniform contents of projects and complaints of regions. Therefore, improvement of current systems is significant object to vitalize small and medium-sized cities. This study focused on the comparison of the small and medium-sized cities located in SMA and provinces. And we classified those cities through cluster analysis and drew up a plan for improvement of current system. The findings from analyses were as follows : First, the unbalance between SMA and provinces were getting worse in the demographic and financial aspects. Especially, the provincial small and medium-sized cities which have population less than 300,000 were faced with serious decrease of the population and an aging society. Second, cluster analysis of those cities revealed that most of small and medium-sized cities were fallen into such groups with shortage of the infrastructure, low economic self-sufficiency and weak infrastructure to growth. Finally, regional development policies include dissatisfaction to solve the fundamental problem of small and medium-sized cities due to the lack of linkage between policies decentralized public investment, and so on. The findings in this study suggests the need for integration of regional development policies and improvement of the current support system to vitalize small and medium-sized cities.