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For consumers to engage in their daily consumption activities, they must purchase goods and services from businesses. Currently, the dominant transaction methods are mail-order sales and e-commerce. To protect consumers in this non-face-to-face transaction market, the E-Commerce Act was enacted in 2002. However, as the law primarily regulates traditional mail-order sales rather than focusing on e-commerce, it fails to adequately reflect the evolving transaction environment. Therefore, to ensure consumer protection in the non-face-to-face transaction market, the E-Commerce Act must be comprehensively revised. In this regard, the 22nd National Assembly has proposed various amendment bills. These efforts reflect the increasing consumer damages related to e-commerce and highlight the direct and indirect limitations of the current law. Furthermore, e-commerce is not a fully established transaction method but one that continuously evolves. To ensure consumer protection aligns with these changes, the E-Commerce Act must undergo ongoing revisions. However, the amendment bills proposed in the 22nd National Assembly, particularly the comprehensive amendment bills, fail to address the fundamental issues of the E-Commerce Act. Instead, they merely reintroduce previous amendment proposals without fully understanding the functions of online platforms. As such, these proposals do not provide fundamental solutions. Thus, a new amendment bill must be introduced to transform the E-Commerce Act into a law that effectively protects consumers in e-commerce and other non-face-to-face markets. This requires a precise analysis of the current state of the non-face-to-face transaction market. In particular, amendment bills should not focus solely on administrative regulations, as doing so would be insufficient to protect consumer rights and contradict efforts to empower consumers to protect their own interests. Instead, amendments should incorporate both judicial regulations and administrative oversight in a balanced manner. Finally, one of the main reasons why the comprehensive amendment bills proposed in the 20th and 21st National Assemblies, as well as the legislative proposal announced by the Korea Fair Trade Commission, were ultimately discarded is that they did not adequately reflect the opinions of stakeholders and lacked professional expertise. Considering this, the 22nd National Assembly must develop a comprehensive amendment bill through expert consultation and stakeholder participation to ensure a more effective and well-informed legislative revision.

BBC-HP is a form of hull charter contract that is widely used in practice. The legal nature of BBC-HP is an important issue because the legal nature of BBC-HP may have different consequences, such as liability for damages and the right to claim fair insurance payments, depending on whether it is legally binding or not. Supreme Court 2019. 12. As can be seen in the 27. Sentencing 2017Da208232, 208249 ruling, the legal nature of BBC-HP was an important issue in determining who the rightful insured party was, and in particular, the ruling of the Supreme Court in this case, BBC-HP, as a new form of BBC-HP, is a meaningful ruling that shows the attitude of our court regarding the legal nature of BBC-HP's specific conditions or matters. However, the court viewed the case of BBC-HP as a conditional lease with a right to purchase. As a result, the ship owner was interpreted as a legitimate insurance claimant and received an unfair advantage, and the fact that the hull charterer suffered a large amount of damage cannot be denied. In this regard, after analyzing the legal nature of BBC-HP once again, it can be interpreted that the standard form used in the UK, which is the standard for maritime law, is BARECON 2001, BARECON 89, and the case law shows that BBC-HP is treated as an installment purchase, which is considered a contract of sale with a reservation of ownership. In addition, there are various theories regarding the legal nature of BBC-HP in Korea, such as the conditional lease, financial lease, and installment sales contract, and the Supreme Court ruled in 2019. 12. 27. Sentencing 2017Da208232, 208249 The previous ruling also confirmed that the BBC-HP is consistently viewed as the sale and purchase of a ship that pays the purchase price in installments over a certain period of time. However, in the Supreme Court's Decisions 208232 and 208249, which were handed down on December 27, 2019, the court interpreted the relevant hull charter agreement as a lease agreement and, accordingly, determined that the shipowner was the rightful claimant for insurance money, and the hull charterer is believed to have suffered enormous economic losses. Even if the terms of the BBC-HP contract in this case are different from the usual BBC-HP contract, the ultimate purpose of the transaction between the parties to the BBC-HP contract is considered to be the sale and purchase of a vessel with the intention of acquiring ownership, in light of the intent to trade and trading practices. In addition, since BBC-HP pays the charter price and the price of the hull at the same time as time passes, it is judged that the damage to the shipowner is greater than that to the ship charterer in the event of the loss or total loss of the ship. Therefore, it is considered that the legal nature of BBC-HP is a contract of sale with a reservation of ownership.

In this paper, we examined how the marine clusters that are already being built can be effectively constructed and what conditions must be met? And the viewpoint of this effectiveness was discussed in terms of whether the 2030 marine fisheries vision proposed by the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries in 2004 can be achieved. In addition, the scope of research to achieve these research objectives: 2030 marine fisheries vision, contents of marine science and technology development project, status of public institutions to be transferred to maritime innovation zone, the needs for cluster building and expected effects of cluster construction were analyzed. And finally, to explore the possibility of cooperation between public institutions, derive a logic model for achieving the 2030 marine fisheries vision through the construction of marine clusters. Therefore, this study is a pilot study of the idea level.

본 연구는 지정학적 위기가 우리나라의 무역에 미치는 영향을 대중 수출입 관계 를 중심으로 분석하는 것을 목적으로 한다. 이를 위해, 1992-2023년 기간 동안 우리 나라의 수출입 금액을 월간 단위로 분석하였다. 또한, 같은 기간 동안 우리나라의 주요 교역대상국인 중국과 미국과의 수출입 금액에 대해서도 분석하였다. 지정학적 위기가 우리나라의 대중 무역에 미치는 영향을 분석하는 데에 있어서, 본 연구에서는 표본기간 동안 발생한 미-중 간의 외교관계의 변화에 주목하였다. 따라서, 주요 지정학적 사건 또는 외교적 사안에 따라 3가지 시기로 구분하였다. 그 결과 1992-2001년, 2002-2013년, 2014-2023년으로 하위 표본기간을 설정하고 분석하 였다. 지정학적 위기와 우리나라 무역의 관계는 벡터자기회귀모형 기반의 그랜저 인과 성 검정을 통해서 분석하였다. 분석 결과, 지정학적 위기가 우리나라의 무역에 미치 는 영향은 일정하지 않고, 시간가변적인 것으로 나타났다. 특히, 지정학적 위기는 대중 수입에 부정적인 영향을 미치는 것으로 나타났는데, 이는 2013년 중국의 일대 일로 정책 발표 이후 시기에 두드러지는 것으로 분석되었다.

This study aims to investigate the impact of geopolitical risk on international trade of Korea especially focusing on bilateral trade between Korea and China. To this end, monthly exports and imports of Korea for the period between 1992-2023 is analyzed. Furthermore, exports and imports of Korea with China and USA, two major trading partners, for the same period is also examined. In analyzing the impact of geopolitical risk, this study pays particular attention to time-varying diplomatic tension between the USA and China. Therefore, the sample period is divided into three sub-periods according to major geopolitical or diplomatic events: 1992-2001, 2002-2013 and 2014-2023. The relationship between geopolitical risk and international trade of Korea is tested in Granger causality framework based on the vector autoregressive models. The results indicate the impact of geopolitical risk is not constant, but time-varying. In addition, rise in geopolitical risk has an adverse impact on imports of Korea from China after 2013 when China announced its Belt and Road Initiative.

The shipbuilding and marine industry is a representative cyclical industry, and it is expected to enter a boom period in the future due to the ship replacement cycle and increased demand for eco-friendly vessels. However, the Korean shipbuilding industry is struggling to secure a domestic workforce, and it is particularly facing challenges in training skilled personnel. Therefore, this study aimed to explore policies for supplying and integrating foreign manpower in order to prepare for the deepening shortage of labor in the shipbuilding and marine industry. To this end, first, the employment status of the domestic shipbuilding and marine industry was analyzed, and the issues were examined. In addition, a survey was conducted among family companies affiliated with Korea Maritime and Ocean University that have strengths in the shipbuilding and marine sector to identify ways to enhance foreign employment in this industry. Consequently, four policies were proposed: support for training foreign human resources, improvement of the foreign human resources recruitment system, revitalization of special pathways for international students, and extension of the stay period for foreign workers.

The Nigerian economy has, in reality, remained fragile to fluctuations in the rate of exchange, inflation, and dependence on oil revenues, despite all efforts to utilize foreign direct investment as a driver for improvement in growth. This has, therefore, influenced this study to look critically at the impact foreign direct investment has on Nigeria's economic growth from 1986 to 2023. An Autoregressive Distributed Lag model was utilized to estimate both the short and long-term effects, while data were sourced from the Central Bank of Nigeria Statistical Bulletin, National Bureau of Statistics, and the World Bank. From the long run estimates, foreign direct investment and exchange rate influenced economic growth positively and significantly. Inflation exhibited negative but significant impact both in the long and short run. Money supply, both in the long and short run, exerted a positive impact on the growth of the economy, however, the impact was insignificant in the short run. Furthermore, trade openness showed a positive but insignificant impact in the long run. The coefficients of oil revenue were positive but insignificant in the long-run estimations. The error correction term, ECT of - 0.1064 with a p-value of 0.0000, inferred that about 10.6% of the deviations were corrected annually. This suggested an average speed of adjustment to the long-run equilibrium after an economic shock. Based on these findings, the study recommended that foreign direct investment in Nigeria should be encouraged by ensuring national security, maintaining business-friendly environments, and offering appropriate fiscal incentives that can attract and sustain more capital inflow into Nigeria.

With the rapid growth of the global economy and advancements in information technology, e-commerce platforms have become essential to modern business, particularly in the key markets of China and South Korea. Consumer behaviors in online shopping are evolving, making it crucial to understand the factors influencing their intention to use e-commerce platforms. This study, based on the Technology Acceptance Model, examines the impact of social influence, price utility, previous experience, and risk on platform usage intentions, comparing consumer perceptions in the two countries. The research objectives include analyzing the current status and characteristics of B2C e-commerce markets in China and South Korea, conducting an empirical analysis of 11 hypotheses, comparing cross-country differences in usage intentions, and offering policy recommendations. Data collection involved a literature review, theoretical analysis, and questionnaire surveys, with statistical analysis performed using SPSS and AMOS. Key methods included structural equation modeling. Findings reveal that perceived value significantly influences continued usage intentions, with differences observed between Chinese and Korean consumers due to varying market maturity and platform attributes. Chinese users prioritize social influence and price utility, while Korean users emphasize risk and usability. Recommendations for platform providers include enhancing perceived value, improving platform compatibility, fostering partnerships, and encouraging innovation.

The global shortage of qualified seafarers necessitates urgent reforms in the training and legal protection of cadet seafarers. This study critically examines legal ambiguities within the STCW Convention regarding cadets’ status, safety, and working conditions, identifying significant gaps that undermine their rights. Through a comparative analysis of maritime regulatory frameworks in key seafaring nations (e.g., the US, UK, India, and South Korea), this study highlights the absence of standardized protections for cadets and proposes targeted amendments to the STCW Convention. Key recommendations include: (1) establishing a formal definition of “Cadet Seafarer” to ensure uniform legal recognition, (2) implementing blockchain-secured digital Training Record Books (TRBs) to enhance transparency and prevent documentation fraud, (3) strengthening the responsibilities of shipping companies and training institutions through mandatory insurance and improved onboard conditions, and (4) revising IMO Model Course 1.21 to incorporate comprehensive cadet-specific safety training. These proposals align with the IMO’s 2024-2029 Strategic Direction and global efforts to promote sustainable maritime labor practices. By modernizing the STCW framework and enhancing cadet protection and training quality, this study ultimately aims to contribute to the development of a resilient and well-trained maritime workforce.