On the growth of Korean technoparks

The Republic of Korea undertook a major initiative in the early 1970s to integrate high-technology industry with its regional development strategy. This effort involved three phases: the development of science towns in the 1970s, the initiation of a technopolis program in the 1980s, and the establishment of science parks or technoparks in the 1990s. We focus on the third phase in this paper, and we identify empirically covariates with the employment growth of Korean technoparks. We find faster employment growth in parks established after the ICT revolution in 2000, in parks with tenants involved in more complex technology development, and in parks with more research-intensive tenants