KDI

On average, small business support projects appear to improve beneficiary sales, and the growth effect is obvious when supporting young or growing firms. However, the effect is largely offset by sales reductions due to overcrowding. Small business support projects must be operated in two ways to alleviate the overcrowding of businesses in a few industries and to enhance the overall effectiveness of the support programs.

Does financial development contribute to economic growth? The literature finds that an expansion in financial resources is useful for economic growth if the degree of financial development is under a certain threshold; otherwise, the expansion is detrimental to growth. Almost every published study, however, considers country-panel data. Accordingly, the results are not directly applicable to the Korean economy. By examining Korean time-series data, this paper finds that there is an inverse U-shaped relationship between the per capita real GDP growth rate and private credit (as a percentage of nominal GDP)―a well-known measure of quantitative financial development, where the threshold is 171.5%. This paper also finds that private credit is positively associated with economic growth if the share of household credit out of private credit is less than 46.9%; otherwise, private credit is negatively associated with economic growth. As of 2016, the ratio of private credit to GDP and the ratio of household credit to private credit are both higher than the corresponding thresholds, which implies that policymakers should place more emphasis on qualitative financial development than on a quantitative expansion of financial resources.

As a case study of an ex-post evaluation of regulations, in this paper I evaluate the ‘uniform settlement rate requirement’, a regulation that was introduced in 1986 and that was applied to the international telephone market in the U.S. for more than 20 years. In a bilateral market between the U.S. and a foreign country, each U.S. firm and its foreign partner jointly provide international telephone service in both directions, compensating each other for terminating incoming calls to their respective countries. The per-minute compensation amount for providing the termination service, referred to as the settlement rate, is determined by a bargaining process involving the two firms. In principle, each U.S. firm could have a different settlement rate for the same foreign country. In 1986, however, the Federal Communications Commission introduced the Uniform Settlement Rate Requirement (USRR), which required all U.S. firms to pay the same settlement rate to a given foreign country. The USRR significantly affected the relative bargaining positions of the U.S. and foreign firms, thereby changing negotiated settlement rates. This paper identifies two main routes through which the settlement rates are changed by the implementation of the USRR: the Competition-Induced-Incentive Effect and the Most-Favored-Nation Effect. I then empirically evaluate the USRR by estimating a bargaining model and conducting counterfactual experiments aimed at measuring the size of the two effects of the USRR. The experiments show remarkably large impacts due to the USRR. Requiring a uniform settlement rate, for instance, results in an average 32.2 percent increase in the negotiated settlement rates and an overall 13.7 percent ($3.43 billion) decrease in the total surplus in the U.S. These results provide very strong evidence against the implementation of the USRR in the 1990s and early 2000s.