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This study highlights the core concepts of oil hub and theorize the process in which financial apparatus bring functionality to physical structure of an oil hub, namely, financial institutionalization of oil hubs. This will be a very crucial task especially to the Korean government’s Northeast Asian (NEA) Oil Hub project which is close to its completion of the first stage in Ulsan, a southeastern port city of Korea. The second stage of oil hub project would be operational shortly. However, merely building tank terminals would not guarantee an operational oil hub unless it creates sufficient liquidity. The authors of this study use their field experiences of visiting numerous tank terminals, trading companies, and other related institutions and were able to discuss some theoretic design of the structure of oil hubs. This study attempts to provides definitions of key terms in the oil hub business and theorize the fundamentals of how an oil hub can be operational. The authors conclude that unless the project aims at creating sufficient liquidity for the NEA oil hub, it is not guaranteed to be functional. They suggest a practical way of creating liquidity by electronically combining the clearing houses of already existing mercantile exchanges of Korea, Japan, and China. The liquidity generated from this design would lead to accumulation of transactions which establishes a hub-based pricing mechanism. This would lead to the most effective way of creating a functioning oil market in Northeast Asia which would be a complement to or competition with Singapore market.

This paper aims to provide useful implications for Korea’s introduction of telemedicine services by studying the development process and legal issues of internet healthcare in China, which is currently rapidly growing. China is promoting the development of internet healthcare based on the ‘Internet+healthcare’ policy in 2015. Since 2018, a number of administrative rules have been enacted to manage internet healthcare services. However, there exist conflicts with the current laws in the restriction of doctors’ business locations, and recognizing internet hospitals and healthcare platforms as medical institutions. For the further development of internet healthcare, the Chinese government needs to solve these legal issues.

This paper examines the necessity of introducing a blockchain bill of lading to solve the crisis of B/L in international trade, and reviews the main tasks related to the use of blockchain B/L. If we apply blockchain technology to B/L in international trade, it can improve the issue and the transfer process of B/L and solve the B/L’s crisis problems. In particular, we can manage transparently and efficiently B/L, prevent fraud due to forgery or alteration of documents, and reduce transaction costs. However, there are also challenges to be solved to utilize the blockchain B/L. It must ensure interoperability between blockchain B/L platforms and compatibility with global trading platforms and prepare legal regulations to govern blockchain B/L. And It has to solve the issues related to the application of smart contracts, and security-related problems remain.

Due to the change in the digital environment of the 4th industry, there is a discrepancy in the value creation and distribution of taxation rights in the digital economy. As a result, governments of each country begin to pay attention to base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS), the digital tax problem has been brought to the fore. In the digital transformation environment, there is a discussion about digital services trade and digital taxation. Considering the inevitable ripple effect of digital tax, a unilateral approach to taxation causes conflict. Therefore, digital trade norms through multilateral negotiations in digital tax and service trade may be the best strategy.

Local banks play a very important policy role in that they are the starting point for regional economic development. Therefore, the academic review on the survival and growth of local banks is urgent and important. To ensure local banks‘ role in the digital financial era, this paper presents a practical strategy for the survival of local banks using BNK Financial Group as a case. Specifically, we suggest a strategy of reorganizing the existing Busan Bank and Kyongnam Bank into a two-bank system of BNK Bank and BNK Digital Bank to compete with big commercial banks and Internet-only banks. This study also proposes a two-track marketing model for BNK Bank and BNK Digital Bank respectively: (1) securing existing customers through positioning as a new top 5 commercial bank; (2) penetrating new customers with the co-operation of tech companies such as NC Soft and NAVER.

This study examines the applicability of the gravity model of conventional trade to an analysis of the trade patterns of cross-border e-commerce. As a result of the analysis, the amount of trade between trading countries increased as the national income increased, while the trade amount decreased as the distance between the capitals increased, as in the existing gravity model. In addition, the increase of the consumer price index and the number of Internet users were found to have a very significant effect on the increase in trade volume. The analysis shows that the FTA has a more significant effect on the increase of trade volume than other regional economic cooperation organizations. Based on the results, it is essential to provide official development assistance (ODA), including Internet infrastructure, and to include convenience terms for the increase of e-commerce trade volume when resigning or renegotiating the FTA in order to secure a competitive edge in cross-border e-commerce trade in the future.

This study tried to estimate the ex-post industrial trade effects of the Korea-ASEAN FTA with the structural gravity equation. In order to effectively achieve this purpose, I used exporter-sector-time and importer-sector-time fixed effects to account for the unobservable multilateral resistance terms, employed the Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood(PPML) estimator to address the issue of heteroskedasticity in trade data and to take advantage of the information contained in the zero trade flows, and used ITPD-E database on international and intra-national trade flows for consistency with the underlying gravity theory. As a result of the PPML estimation, it was found that the effects of the basic gravitational factors (distance, common language, colonial relationship, border, etc.) widely adopted are heterogeneous by industry, and the Korea-ASEAN FTA’s sectoral trade effects were the highest in the manufacturing sector.

Based on the traditional Chinese entrepreneurship, Guanxi culture, as a type of networking, this study analyzed the external network effects of Chinese corporate managers and studied whether there is a moderating effect of organizational culture and information absorption capacity. This study analyzed the organizational culture (agreement culture, development culture, rational culture, hierarchical culture) and information absorption capacity (acquisition capacity, utilization capacity) of Chinese companies as moderating effects. As a result of conducting a survey on Chinese companies, a total of 294 effective samples were secured. Summarizing these analysis results, it was found that organizational culture had a significant positive (+) effect as a moderating effect between CEO characteristics and external networks. It was found that information absorption capacity has a moderating effect between CEO characteristics and external networks and has a significant positive (+) effect.