INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS OF SOCIAL OVERHEAD CAPITAL STOCK: FOCUSED ON THE TRANSPORTATION SECTOR

Abstract

It has been an issue for the South Korean government to understand the sufficiency of its transportation infrastructure supply. One of the widely accepted ways to identify the proper amount of transportation infrastructure supply of a country is to compare the country’s total amount to that of other countries, using indices such as total road length per capita or total road length per registered number of cars. The purpose of this study is to identify the problems of international comparisons based on these indices and to provide ideas that can help identify the reasonable amount of transportation infrastructure supply for a country. The study found that international comparisons through indices may result in very different outcomes depending on the indices applied. When total road length per square meter is used, South Korea is ranked below the average among the OECD member countries. However, the rank goes up to 3rd or higher when the comparison is conducted with total road length per capita. This study proposes an index for identifying a country’s transportation infrastructure supply in the transportation sector with a “volume-to-capacity ratio”. With the availability of international data for measuring volume-to-capacity ratio, the index would work as an appropriate measure since it considers both demand and supply of transportation capacity, particularly travel demand’s behaviours responding to the limited capacity of the networks. The study concludes with ideas to enhance the indices, for example, reflecting the recent paradigm shift of the transportation policy that considers user satisfaction of the provided transportation services.