Research Reports
Policy Direction of Fostering Rural Social Enterprises for Rural Development
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AuthorKim, Kwangsun
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Publication Date2010.10.01
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Original
Recently, developing social enterprises is considered as the third way to vitalize depressed rural areas instead of government policy and market mechanism. But we have just a few ideas of the actual condition and the potential roles of rural social enterprises. It is the very purpose of this study to analyze their condition and roles in rural development, and suggest policy strategies to foster rural social enterprises.
We carried out a survey targeting rural social enterprises to review their real condition, and analyzed their roles in endogenous rural development based on the survey results. We also performed in-depth case studies of Hoengseong-gun(Gangwon-do) and Jinan-gun (Jeollabuk-do) to look into the realities of social economies of rural areas and the roles of individual social enterprises in rural vitalization.
With the results of the survey and case studies, we found out that rural social enterprises are very conducive to endogenous rural development by local embeddedness of their input-output linkages, socio-economic networks, labor input, etc. Yet, some problems to be solved are also discovered. For instance, rural social enterprises lack outward linkages for accessing to more specialized resources such as finance, information, experts, and so forth.
As a result of this study, we suggested some policy strategies to foster rural social enterprises as follows.
Firstly, a variety of agents acting in rural social economies should be discovered and fostered as social enterprises.
Secondly, the existing government certification system of social enterprises should be amended so that various voluntary and organizational efforts to improve difficult situations of rural areas can be appreciated as social enterprises.
Thirdly, business models for social enterprises suited to rural areas should be developed and disseminated.
Fourthly, rural social enterprises should be offered protected markets in terms of not efficiency but effectiveness on rural vitalization and job creation.
Lastly, government supports should be offered to rural social enterprises on the basis of differences of their business fields.
Researchers: Kwang-Sun Kim, In-Hey Kwon and Chang-Ho Kim
Research Period: 2010.1~2010.10
E-mail Address: yeskskim@krei.re.kr
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