Micro business in Korea are placed in a peculiar position. On the one hand, they have the highest employment rate in the overall industry. On the other hand, they meet with a serious obstacle to progress due to the highly competitive domestic market, ...
Micro business in Korea are placed in a peculiar position. On the one hand, they have the highest employment rate in the overall industry. On the other hand, they meet with a serious obstacle to progress due to the highly competitive domestic market, on which their substantial achievement largely depend. To make matters worse, they tend to fall far behind big businessmen in terms of the use of information, which is crucial to business management in this information age. Due to a digital divide, they are compelled to focus on their business as a means of living from the outset, and hindered from promoting their business to a solid medium business or expanding it into a big business. In spite of such an assessment of the situation, Micro business are disposed to think that the trend of economic performance as a whole determines the success or failure of their business. So, there has been little systematic study on information availability until now. In this paper, I tried to verify a claim that information availability holds the major key to the growth and success of Micro business in Korea.
There has yet been hardly any study at home, let alone abroad on the barrier to the growth of small trade and industry. So, the study in this area inevitably depends on the existing studies on small and medium businesses. In this paper, I adopted those studies at home and abroad as groundwork, but organized the contents of my study to accommodate the actual circumstances in Korea. The target class of my research and analysis was the one to which domestic small businessmen and industrialists belong. As a result, I was able to clarify an obstacle to the growth of small trade and industry in Korea as a level of information-literacy which includes computer-literacy. The lack of financing and business mind suggested in this paper as an obstacle to growth is greatly affected by the lack of computer-literacy. Specifically, at the primary stage of the use of information, the lack of efforts to search information has the gravest impact on the obstacle to growth, and at the most advanced stage, the lack of information-processing has a significant impact on it. This shows that Korean small businessmen and industrialists have to go through the minimal stages in the use of information in order to manage their business well, and that despite using information at the advanced stage, information-breakdown in actual circumstances works as an obstacle to growth. In addition, it turns out that the lack of financing and business mind posited in this paper as an obstacle to growth has a significant impact on the outcome of financial affairs, and that the lack of business mind influences on the outcome of non-financial affairs which reflect psychological factors.
In this paper, I tried to reflect the cause of recession which is generally estimated to have the greatest effect on the barrier to the growth or achievement of Korean small businessmen and industrialists as little as possible. Because it is necessary for my study to be meaningful that the subjects not show great disparity in their achievement. So, I surveyed 322 subjects who visited the Regional Support Center for Small Businessmen and Industrialists at Seoul and Kyunggi and applied for financial support.
It is no exaggeration to say that the studies on small businessmen and industrialists in Korea have been carried out at the incipient stage. Admittedly, regarding the criteria of a survey in this paper, there are some parts which are not perfectly objective. Nevertheless, subsequent studies can adopt the methodology used in this paper as groundwork, and adapt it to characteristics of the different types and regions of small trade and industry in Korea. This will show that there are various ways which enable Korean small businessmen and industrialists to run not merely their business as a means of living but as an area with high growth-potential.