Statistics of Foreign Investment in Korea
산업별
제조업에 대한 투자는 전년 대비 28.4% 감소하여 653백만불, 서비스업에 대한 투자는 8.6% 증가하여 822백만불을 기록
< 산업별 외국인직접투자 동향 >
http://www.investkorea.org/InvestKoreaWar/work/ik/kor/index.jsp
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Friday, April 23, 2010
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Tourism FDI dips from 2008 peak
Tourism FDI dips from 2008 peak
Published: February 13, 2010
FDI into the hotels and tourism sector soared in 2008, but dropped slightly in 2009 as economic uncertainty took hold.
FDI in the hotels and tourism sector increased dramatically in 2008, compared with previous years.
Many factors contributed to this increase, including the low-fare airlines boom, which revolutionised travel overseas. But as the global recession took hold in the third quarter of 2008, has the fall in FDI in 2009 been caused by the recession as consumers tighten their purse strings, or has the era of cheap travel passed its peak?
FDI in the hotels and tourism sector remained at a relatively steady level prior to 2008. Between 2003 and 2007, the sector accounted for an annual average of 289 FDI projects, a combined investment of $31.75bn and the creation of an estimated 67,663 jobs. Yet in 2008, FDI in this sector boomed, with project numbers increasing by 92%, investment up 92%, and job creation more than doubling, up 116% on the 2003 to 2007 annual average.
The latest results released by fDi Markets show that FDI in the hotels and tourism sector declined slightly in 2009 but has not dropped to pre-2008 levels. In 2009, 370 FDI projects were recorded, constituting $37.2bn of investment and resulting in the creation of an estimated 87,288 jobs. Only 2010 will tell whether FDI in the hotels and tourism sector has passed its peak, or if 2009 is just a glitch in its growth pattern.
By the numbers
Since 2003, FDI in the hotels and tourism sector has accounted for a total of 2370 FDI projects, which consisted of a combined total investment of $257bn and the creation of an estimated 571,526 jobs. Between 2003 and 2009, FDI in the hotels and tourism sector experienced an annual average increase of 9% in project numbers. The majority of this growth occurred in 2008, when FDI project numbers increased by 87% on 2007’s figures.
China ranked as the top destination for FDI in the hotels and tourism sector, attracting 8.6% of all FDI projects. Together, the top five destination countries – China, the UK, the United Arab Emirates, India and Russia – attracted nearly one-third of all FDI projects in the hotels and tourism sector. Although China was the top destination country, the UAE’s Dubai ranked as the top destination city globally. Between 2003 and 2009, 71 FDI projects were located in Dubai and 24 FDI projects were located in Abu Dhabi. These two cities accounted for 86% of FDI projects into the UAE in the hotels and tourism sector. US-based companies were responsible for the vast majority of FDI in the sector, accounting for 28% of global projects.
Due to the nature of the hotels and tourism sector, most of the FDI projects were involved in construction activities. The construction of hotels and tourist attractions accounted for 83% of all FDI in this sector, whereas sales, marketing and support activities accounted for 13% of projects.
Major hotel groups have been responsible for the bulk of FDI projects in the hotels and tourism sector. Hotel giants Accor, InterContinental, Marriott, Carlson and the Hilton group accounted for one-quarter of all investments. Dubai Holding accounted for half of all FDI projects created by companies from the UAE, with 97% of these projects set up in 2008 and 2009.
The most popular motive for investing in the sector, stated by 51% of companies, is ‘domestic market growth potential’. Other motives stated included ‘proximity to markets/customers’ and ‘regulations/business climate’.
For more information contact fdiintelligence@ft.com or +44 (0)207 775 6667.
Click here to view the charts
http://www.fdimagazine.com/news/fullstory.php/aid/3256
Monday, April 19, 2010
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
World Bank - Doing Business 2010 - Comparing Regulation in 183 Countries
Doing Business 2010: Reforming Through Difficult Times is the seventh in a series of annual reports investigating
regulations that enhance business activity and those that constrain it. Doing Business presents quantitative indicators
on business regulations and the protection of property rights that can be compared across 183 economies, from
Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, over time.
A set of regulations affecting 10 stages of a business’s life are measured: starting a business, dealing with construction
permits, employing workers, registering property, getting credit, protecting investors, paying taxes, trading across
borders, enforcing contracts and closing a business. Data in Doing Business 2010: Reforming Through Difficult Times
are current as of June 1, 2009*. The indicators are used to analyze economic outcomes and identify what reforms have
worked, where, and why.
The Doing Business methodology has limitations. Other areas important to business such as an economy’s proximity
to large markets, the quality of its infrastructure services (other than those related to trading across borders), the
security of property from theft and looting, the transparency of government procurement, macroeconomic conditions
or the underlying strength of institutions, are not studied directly by Doing Business. To make the data comparable
across economies, the indicators refer to a specific type of business, generally a local limited liability company
operating in the largest business city. Because standard assumptions are used in the data collection, comparisons and
benchmarks are valid across economies. The data not only highlight the extent of obstacles to doing business; they
also help identify the source of those obstacles, supporting policymakers in designing reform.
The data set covers 183 economies: 46 in Sub-Saharan Africa, 32 in Latin America and The Caribbean, 27 in Eastern
Europe and Central Asia, 24 in East Asia and Pacific, 19 in the Middle East and North Africa and 8 in South Asia, as
well as 27 OECD high-income economies as benchmarks.
The data used for this country profile
come from the Doing Business database and are summarized in graphs. These graphs allow a comparison of the
economies in each region not only with one another but also with the “good practice” economy for each indicator.
The good-practice economies are identified by their position in each indicator as well as their overall ranking and by
their capacity to provide good examples of business regulation to other countries. These good-practice economies do
not necessarily rank number 1 in the topic or indicator, but they are in the top 10.
More information is available in the full report. Doing Business 2010: Reforming Through Difficult Times presents
the indicators, analyzes their relationship with economic outcomes and recommends reforms. The data, along with
information on ordering the report, are available on the Doing Business website (www.doingbusiness.org).
* Except for the Paying Taxes indicator that refers to the period January to December of 2008.
Note: Doing Business 2008 and Doing Business 2009 data and rankings have been recalculated to
reflect changes to the methodology and the addition of new countries (in the case of the rankings).
Source: http://www.tourismroi.com/InteriorTemplate.aspx?ID=34930
Saturday, January 30, 2010
US History Companion: Social Sciences
US History Companion: Social Sciences |
The idea that human society could be studied "scientifically" gained prominence throughout the Western world during the nineteenth century largely as a result of the triumphs of the sciences of nature, especially physics and biology. If the application of scientific method to the natural order increased our knowledge and enabled us to create new industries and technologies, might not the application of this method to human beings enable us to understand ourselves and bring our affairs under more rational control? Although the hope implied in this question was given its earliest and most influential formulations by European thinkers--especially Auguste Comte of France and John Stuart Mill of Great Britain--the United States proved to be the primary national setting in which the project of developing a "science of society" flourished. American intellectuals created a formidable complex of professional organizations, journals, and attendant institutions designed to advance this project. The history of social science, while in large part an episode in international history, is also a major episode in the intellectual history of the United States.
European social scientists have often claimed to possess more philosophical sophistication than do their American colleagues, to have pursued projects of greater theoretical significance, and to have maintained a more critical perspective on the power structure of their own societies. Although these comparisons have sometimes been overdrawn, it is true that American social scientists have excelled in data-gathering, in the development of research institutions, and in the volume of research completed. It was by means of a creativity more institutional than intellectual that American social science established itself decisively between about 1880 and World War I. During those years American scholars created a variety of specialized professional organizations (e.g., the American Economic Association, founded 1885; the American Political Science Association, 1903; and the American Sociological Society, 1905) and coordinated the activities of these organizations with the operation of two other vital institutions developed simultaneously: the journals in which social science research could be published (e.g., the American Journal of Sociology and the American Political Science Review) and the discipline-defined departments (e.g., economics, sociology, and psychology) in universities around which both doctoral and undergraduate programs were organized. No individual American social scientist of this era made intellectual contributions remotely as original or as enduring as those made in Germany by Max Weber, in England by Alfred Marshall, or in France by Émile Durkheim. Nevertheless, in America the enterprise of specialized, professional social science was firmly and extensively in place.
A major source of the growth of social science in the United States was the widespread hope of middle-class reformers that "experts" would be able to solve many of the social problems that had become manifest in an urban, industrial society with a largely immigrant labor force. Could poverty, corruption, crime, monopoly, and inefficiency be contained by new knowledge and by expert administration? Not only might the social sciences help legislatures and philanthropists address these problems; they might produce a class of "social engineers" ready to manage human affairs. Especially during the Progressive Era, public discussion of social science emphasized this potential contribution to public policy and administration.
Although this technocratic impulse remained prominent within American social science and in the outlook of many people who supported it, two rather different impulses gained strength in the 1920s and proved equally enduring. One was the conviction that the business of social scientists was simply to advance knowledge. In this view, knowledge might be put to good use by politicians, journalists, and everyday citizens, but the role of social scientists themselves was strictly research and theoretical analysis. This "pure science" perspective was evident, for example, in Recent Social Trends (1933), a massive analysis of American society and its problems commissioned by President Herbert Hoover. This perspective became more sharply etched in what came to be called the "behaviorist" and "empiricist" movements of the post-World War II era, as exemplified in quantitative studies of voting behavior. The classic study of this sort was The American Voter (1960), by Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, William Miller, and Donald Stokes.
The second nontechnocratic impulse installed the social scientist in the role of public moralist previously filled by the clergy and by men and women of letters. Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) combined an anthropologist's report of fieldwork in the South Pacific with a social critic's opinions concerning the basic values that ought to inform the lives of Americans. Mead developed a genre of social scientific writing for a large public that was later adopted by a great many of her contemporaries and successors, including the psychologist B. F. Skinner, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and the sociologists David Riesman and Daniel Bell. Some of these scholars were said to be too journalistic by their pure science contemporaries within American social science, but the latter, in turn, were accused of being narrowly scientistic and of exaggerating their own methodological affinities with physicists.
Although the distinctions among technocrats, pure researchers, and public moralists cut across disciplinary lines, it is those lines between disciplines that have most defined the work and self-image of American social scientists since the Progressive Era. By that time, the sociologists, political scientists, and economists had sorted themselves out from one another and from the historians, with whom the political scientists especially had been closely associated. By that time, also, the psychologists were becoming more sharply set apart from the philosophers, with whom they often continued to share university departments. Anthropology had always been a distinctive enterprise in America, having begun with museums rather than with universities and reform organizations as its primary institutional home. Yet by 1920 the anthropologists were advancing quickly into academia, even if by means of departments shared with sociologists. Hence much of the history of American social science is a history of specific disciplines, each of which has maintained its own agendas for research and its own shifting theoretical premises. Each of these disciplines, moreover, has become increasingly specialized into subdisciplines, each possessed of its own journals and national professional societies. This is especially true of psychology: some university departments of psychology have become little more than administrative devices for the management of what amounts to four or five distinctive, departmentlike programs in undergraduate education as well as graduate training and research.
Some of these American social scientific disciplines became known throughout the world for distinctive intellectual orientations that endured for decades. American anthropologists, for example, were distinguished by their practice of cross-cultural analysis, which undermined the claims to absolute validity made on behalf of the norms of any particular culture. This anthropology of the Boasian school (so called for its leader, Franz Boas) supplanted an "evolutionary" school dominant in the nineteenth century. The Boasians largely controlled American anthropology from the era of World War I until the 1960s. Even thereafter, the most widely discussed American anthropologist of the 1970s and 1980s, Clifford Geertz, worked in the Boasian tradition.
American psychologists were sharply divided into several competing schools, the most prominent of which from the 1930s through the 1970s was the anti-introspective behaviorist school led by Clark Hull and B. F. Skinner. Many of the advances made by the behaviorists resulted from research carried out on laboratory animals, especially rats.
American economists have excelled in the refinement and mathematical modeling of laws believed to operate in capitalist economies. Although the maverick Thorstein Veblen is a famous counterexample, most leading economists in modern America have been called neoclassical because of their broad affinities with the highly rationalist classical theorists (e.g., Adam Smith and David Ricardo) of the early era of capitalist development. Among the most influential of these American neoclassical theorists in the period since World War II have been the Nobel laureates Paul Samuelson, Kenneth Arrow, and Herbert Solow.
Sociology and political science have been more intellectually diverse than the other social scientific disciplines in the United States. Between the 1930s and the 1970s, however, the functionalist orientation of Talcott Parsons and Robert K. Merton defined a large portion of the work done by American sociologists. The functionalists tended to see society as an equilibrium of forces and interests, subject to change through adaptation to novel conditions. The diversity of American political scientists was narrowed in the 1960s by the behaviorist revolution of which The American Voter, cited above, was an exemplary agent. Traditionalists committed to the study of political theory and political institutions sometimes resisted the behaviorists' emphasis on quantitative, large-data-base research with the result that political science became the most contentious of the disciplinary communities within American social science.
Yet for all their disciplinary identity, American social scientists carried out two cross-disciplinary projects of considerable public importance during the third quarter of the twentieth century. The first was the critique of the theoretical and empirical bases for racial discrimination in the United States. Some of the relevant social scientific research was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in its pivotal 1954 ruling against segregated public schools, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. In the ensuing era, intensive public discussion of race in American life drew upon the work of social scientists of every discipline. Sociologists were especially successful in demonstrating the falsity of many traditional ideas about race, and their work charted the destructive effects of racism on the lives of black Americans.
The second major cross-disciplinary project was directed at what were often called the developing nations of the third world. The experience of postcolonial societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America was interpreted within the terms of a theory of modernization, according to which every society passes successively through the stages already seen in the modern history of the industrialized West. In this view, the basic social structural, economic, and cultural transformations that took place in Great Britain, Germany, France, and the United States could be expected to unfold in Ghana, Kenya, Indonesia, and other modernizing nations. This theory was articulated in the shadow of the American-Soviet rivalry and was sometimes offered frankly as the basis for an anticommunist program of world economic development. This was true, for example, of one of the most widely cited formulations of the theory, The Stages of Economic Growth (1959) by the economist Walter W. Rostow. The refinement and critical revision of modernization theory was carried out by the political scientist David Apter, the sociologist Daniel Lerner, and a host of scholars in many disciplines.
The intellectual diversity that always characterized social science in America remains more pronounced than ever and renders more difficult any effort to generalize about it as a single entity. Although the concept of social science was originally a means of encouraging and enabling what was once a novel and specific set of projects devoted to the scientific study of society, this set of projects, once firmly established and elaborated by several generations of energetic and creative scholars, outgrew the late nineteenth century's notion of what it meant to be scientific. By the late twentieth century individuals and groups within many of the social science disciplines were doing work very similar to that being carried out simultaneously by historians, philosophers, and other humanistic scholars, even literary critics. The line between science and nonscience that meant so much to early sociologists and political scientists, especially, seemed less portentous to their well-established successors. That "blurred genres" were a prominent feature of the 1970s and 1980s was suggested by Clifford Geertz, and many people came to regard the concept of social science as little more than a convenient administrative category for dealing with a sprawling expanse of enterprises not easily absorbed into natural science, nor into the even more multitudinous humanities.
Author:
David A. Hollinger
source: http://www.answers.com/topic/social-sciences
The competitiveness Institute
On Cluster Theory
Links: The competitiveness Institutehttp://www.competitiveness.org/article/archive/29/
Definition of cluster
Bibliography
Co-opetition
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