A STRATEGY TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE INDUSTRY IN KOREA

The Republic of Korea needs to promote the sustainable industry due to the socio-economic as well as environmental threats. The principal threats to the industry are insufficiency and depletion of un-renewable natural resources, decline of economic growth rate, increase of unemployment and lack of working labor owing to being the aging society. Another reason is that Korea’s industrial structure is biased to the resource- and energy-intensive industries. In the last three decades, Korea’s main industrial policies were focused on the export-drive and heavy industrialization to overcome the poverty. In the meanwhile, Korea’s industries are feeble to the global environmental regulations and have difficulty in getting competence in the new era. Therefore building up sustainability of industry via strengthening the competence of industry is the most important agenda to be solved. Sustainable industry can be reached by means of two approaches. The one is to accomplish the sustainability of industry through enhancing eco-efficiency, and the other is to change the industrial structure to be more sustainable. The former is short-ter