This paper analyzes the interaction between regional economic growth and air pollution in China and Korea. The relationship between gross regional product per capita and industrial emission of sulfur dioxide emission is examined at the regional level using simultaneous equation models covering 286 cities in China and 228 cities and counties in South Korea of the period 2006–2016. The results find that regional differences existed in the relationship between air pollution and economic growth in two countries. In both countries, an inverted U-shaped pattern was found in metropolitan areas while a U-shaped pattern of non-metropolitan areas. Although the emissions of pollutants in metropolitan areas of both countries have shown a downward trend in recent years, there is still a large gap between the overall emission levels of China and South Korea. Moreover, the level of pollutant emissions of China’s metropolitan areas is much higher than in non-metropolitan areas, while the opposite result has occurred in Korea. In China, there was an inverted U-shaped relationship of the eastern and northwest region, while U-shaped relationships existed in the southwest, central and northeast regions.

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Abstract:The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of education and R&D investment on regional economic growth in South Korea. We develop a simultaneous model of production, human capital accumulation, migration, population and physical capital investment of two regions: the Seoul Metropolitan Area and the rest of Korea. We decompose the regional growth path into a quality path and a quantity path to identify how regional economies grow and run simulations to evaluate alternative policies in terms of effectiveness and adaptability. The impact of education and R&D investment on regional growth in the rest of Korea is only 22.3% of that in the Seoul Metropolitan Area due to lower elasticity values of young in-migrants with respect to the investment in the rest of Korea. An enhanced efficiency of regional human capital accumulation is effective and adaptable to alleviate regional economic disparity.

This research attempts to analyze economic effects of spatial integration of urban water service markets in Korea, employing the notion of economies of scale in terms of cost‐effectiveness. The economies of scale are measured by the elasticity of supply with respect to the production cost from the translog cost function of urban water supply enterprises. It was found that the economies of scale in most urban water utility firms of Seoul Metropolitan region have continuously increased during the period 1989–1994. While the economies of scale would be hardly influenced by the changes in population density, they would tend to decrease marginally in response to the rise in employment density. If the urban water markets of the Seoul Metropolitan Region were consolidated into a single water service market without any changes to the current spatial network of water supply and regional economic attributes, the production cost would be reduced up to 47.1 percent of the actual cost in 1994. Those savings would be enough to make up for the financial deficit of the water production of the Seoul Metropolitan Region.