Economic Effect of Zoning Regulations on Korea's Small and Medium-Sized Retailers*

In this paper, we investigated the economic effects of zoning regulations on the retail industry in Korea. We estimated the changes in the number of sales for retail stores using a panel regression analysis for stores in traditional markets. This analysis was conducted to examine the benefit of zoning regulations on retail stores. Our results show that the zoning regulations (called Traditional Commercial Activity Protection Zones) have contributed to an improvement in the actual business performance of small independent retailers. We found that the amount of sales for each store clearly increased on average in the areas designated as Traditional Commercial Activity Protection Zones where there was no market entry of mega supermarket chains (called SSM in Korea). We also present evidence that the effects of this policy differ geographically: the effects were stronger for small and medium cities than for large metropolitan cities. These results suggest that zoning regulations enacted by the government to protect traditional markets and small retailers should also consider regional differences when assessing policy effectiveness.