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Abstract: The international trade of Korea and Taiwan has been heavily dependent upon international seatransportation owing to geo-political aspects. Therefore, the two countries have exerted to develop and promote ocean-going shipping industry in order to support their economies. Recent financial crisis in together with the economic slowdown has reduced seaborne trade cargoes, which resulted in remarkably deteriorated revenues of the container shipping sector. Major container shipping companies of both countries such as Evergreen, Yang Ming, Hyundai, and Hanjin under our study are no exception. This paper intends to achieve two-fold aims. The first applies entropy to find the relative weights of financial ratios of the four companies each year. In so doing, we can find the weights variance for the period of 1999–2009 based on the financial performance of the above companies. The second is to rank the companies in the period by grey relation analysis. On the basis of findings in this paper, we suggest business policy implications to mitigate impacts of the financial tsunami in the context of world shipping area. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The purpose of this paper is to perform a comparative analysis of the competitive advantages of the national fleets of Taiwan, Korea, and Japan, and explore the effect of shipping aid policies on a national fleet׳s competitive advantage, employing gray relational analysis (GRA). We found that the factors best able to assess the competitive advantage of a national merchant fleet include number of vessels, gross tonnage and deadweight tonnage of the fleet, number of seamen, and cargo volume transported by the fleet. We further discovered that Korean national merchant fleet has the greatest competitive advantage, followed by the fleets of Taiwan and Japan in that order, and found that aggressive shipping aid policies are a more effective way to ensure good performance than passive shipping aid policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The strong and sustained growth performance over the last few decades of the emerging economies in Southeast Asia, including Korea and Taiwan, has stimulated an extensive literature. The ‘miracle’ explanation of economic growth in the Asian region is now discredited but the phenomenon remains the subject of several important economic debates in an extensive literature. These debates include the issue of whether there is a distinct Asian ‘model’ of growth, the extent to which their success marks the triumph of market-oriented solutions over government intervention and the sources of their competitiveness and productivity growth. This study examines the development strategy of late entrants in Taiwan and Korea’s TFT-LCD industry. It was suggested that Korea, under the full support of its government, tends to challenge the first mover in the TFT-LCD technology and compete with the frontier-Japan. On the other hand, Taiwan did not attempt to challenge the technology leadership in a confrontational manner, but focused on being a superior quick follower. In addition, the research paper also addresses the competitive strategies of both countries. The niche strategy for Korea can be attributed to global networking, production, investment, and innovation capability, while the niche strategy and the core competence of Taiwan’s TFT-LCD industry is mainly from system integration capability, quality, cost, and flexibility. The approaches of Taiwan and Korea may shed light on the strategies to be followed by developing countries when they seek to enter knowledge-intensive, high-technology sectors. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The paper reviewed studies about total gaseous mercury, atmospheric particulate of mercury and average dry deposition fluxes of mercury in Korea, Japan, China and Taiwan. This study compared sample collection and analytical methods for mercury in Asian countries. Analytical results indicated that the primary mercury sources are anthropogenic source (for example coal burning) and high temperature processes. This study also elucidates the sources, analytical tools, and the average concentrations for atmospheric mercury (Hg) for these Asian countries during 2000–2008. This study indicated that the total gaseous mercury concentrations were higher in urban area than that in suburban area in Asian countries (Korea, Japan, China and Taiwan). As for the seasonal variations, in general, the average total gaseous mercury concentrations were higher in winter than that in summer especially in China. In addition, the average total gaseous mercury concentrations were higher in mining areas than that in the rest of the other areas. And the total gaseous mercury concentrations were decreasing as this distance increasing. These phenomena revealed that the total gaseous mercury concentrations are reduced by long-distance transportation especially in the main land of China. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]