Future strategy for socioeconomic and political change in Korea

Abstract

Korea is facing socioeconomic and political change. Working age population begins to decrease. We found that an increase of older workers has positive effects on value added per worker for risky or growing large manufacturing companies. This implied that companies with financial troubles or those planning to downsize should be cautious to lay off older workers because these workers contribute positively to productivity under certain conditions. Next, there is high demand for amendment of Constitution of Korea. According to our Constitutional Legal network analysis, hub articles like “Equal rights” and “Protection of freedom and rights” took noticeably central positions and connected strongly to each other during last 30 years. We identified the rank order of some articles (i.e. Dignity and pursuit of happiness or Freedom of occupation) are getting higher while other articles getting lower. This implied that some articles are gaining greater importance in Korean society. When the Constitution is amended, the portion of important articles should be enlarged and the less important ones be reduced. Lastly, in politics, deliberative democracy is expected to rise as a supplement to existing representative democracy. Our agent based modeling approach showed that deliberative democracy decreases opinion polarization and group discussion plays a more important role in reducing polarization. Therefore, institutional design of deliberative democracy should focus on group discussion.