Job Creation during Korea’s Transition to a Knowledge Economy

Abstract

This paper analyzes job creation when the Korean economy transitioned to a knowledge economy from the 1990s to the 2010s. During this period, the ratio of service to manufacturing jobs increased, knowledge intensive industries grew, and job creation became geographically concentrated around Seoul. The changes slowed down in the 2010s, and overall job growth weakened. To analyze the effect of job creation driver industries during this period, the main part of which are knowledge intensive tradable service industries, on local service job creation, I use a modified version of the local labor market of Moretti (2010). I analyze the job changes during 1995-2005 and during 2006- 2016 in 237 Si-Gun-Gu areas in the Census on Establishments datasets. I find that one manufacturing job creates 0.5 local service jobs and that one tradable service job creates 1.1 jobs within Gu areas of metro cities and 2.3 jobs in Si-Gun areas. The job creation relationship between the tradable and local service sectors was not altered in this period. As more jobs were created in the tradable sector driven by the transition to a knowledge economy, job creation overall remained active, with the opposite also being true.