Korea's competition law and policies in perspective symposium on competition law and policy in developing countries

The aim of this article is to provide an overview of competition law and competition policy in Korea and to analyze their relationship with other important national economic policies. Section II provides a historical survey of the country\u27s competition law and policy. Section III examines the major components of the law and evaluates how the antitrust authority has actually enforced its provisions in practice. It also highlights elements of the law that have been tailored to Korea\u27s unique economic circumstances. Section IV focuses on the relationship between competition policy and related economic policies-in particular, industrial policy and trade and investment policy-and gives some case studies. Section V discusses Korea\u27s recent expansion of its antitrust jurisdiction beyond its own territory. Section VI offers some policy suggestions for other developing Asian countries based on the Korean experience with competition policy

Korean Competition Law: First Step towards Globalization

Over recent years, there have been numerous debates among various members from the Korean legal community in discussing whether the Monopoly Regulation and Fair Trade Act(MRFTA) currently effective in Korea, as it pertains to regulating the unfair trade practices of business enterprises (the Competition Statute), contains sufficient mechanisms to provide adequate remedies to injured parties in Competition Statute violation cases. Despite all efforts exerted by the Fair Trade Commission(FTC) in enforcing the Competition Statute, there seems to be an obvious limit as to what it can do, which appears to be caused by the following three main factors: (i) a general perception that governmental regulatory efforts should be contained; (ii) a general perception that corrective orders are overly intrusive; and (iii) cultural indifference in resorting to legal remedies. There are measures that may be taken to overcome such barriers which limit both the regulatory body and injured parties, which include such measures as introducing treble damage compensation, lowering the barrier of commencing a legal action, allowing injunctive orders, and introducing a Parens Patriae action or Consent Decree system. Over recent years, there have been numerous debates among various individuals from the Korean legal community in relation to the Monopoly Regulation and Fair Trade Act (MRFTA). Among the various issues that come up in such debates, one pertains to the effectiveness of a part of the MRFTA which is related to regulating the unfair trade practices of business enterprises (the Competition Statute or Statute). In particular, discussions arise in terms of whether the current Statute contains sufficient mechanisms to provide adequate remedies to injured parties in Competition Statute violation cases. In that regard, this article will review some of the issues that arise in such discussions. In doing so, this article has been divided into three main sections. The first section will illustrate the types of remedies the Statute currently affords to injured parties. Thereafter, the second section will provide a brief discussion on certain factors that limit the FTCs efforts in providing appropriate remedies to injured parties. The last section will provide a discussion on potential measures that may be taken to improve the remedial measures in future cases

Silicon germanium photo-blocking layers for a-IGZO based industrial display

Amorphous indium- gallium-zinc oxide (a-IGZO) has been intensively studied for the application to active matrix flat-panel display because of its superior electrical and optical properties. However, the characteristics of a-IGZO were found to be very sensitive to external circumstance such as light illumination, which dramatically degrades the device performance and stability practically required for display applications. Here, we suggest the use for silicon-germanium (Si-Ge) films grown plasmaenhanced chemical vapour deposition (PECVD) as photo-blocking layers in the a-IGZO thin film transistors (TFTs). The charge mobility and threshold voltage (V-th) of the TFTs depend on the thickness of the Si-Ge films and dielectric buffer layers (SiNX), which were carefully optimized to be similar to 200 nm and similar to 300 nm, respectively. As a result, even after 1,000 s illumination time, the V-th and electron mobility of the TFTs remain unchanged, which was enabled by the photo-blocking effect of the Si-Ge layers for a-IGZO films. Considering the simple fabrication process by PECVD with outstanding scalability, we expect that this method can be widely applied to TFT devices that are sensitive to light illumination.

META-BTS: Bootstrapping Precision Beyond the Limit

Bootstrapping, which enables the full homomorphic encryption scheme that can perform an infinite number of operations by restoring the modulus of the ciphertext with a small modulus, is an essential step in homomorphic encryption. However, bootstrapping is the most time and memory consuming of all homomorphic operations. As we increase the precision of bootstrapping, a large amount of computational resources is required. Specifically, for any of the previous bootstrap designs, the precision of bootstrapping is limited by rescaling precision. In this paper, we propose a new bootstrapping algorithm of the Cheon-Kim-Kim-Song (CKKS) scheme to use a known bootstrapping algorithm repeatedly, so called { Meta-BTS}. By repeating the original bootstrapping operation twice, one can obtain another bootstrapping with its precision essentially doubled; it can be generalized to be $k$-fold bootstrapping operations for some $k>1$ while the ciphertext size is large enough. Our algorithm overcomes the precision limitation given by the rescale operation

Effects of stress, depression, and spousal and familial support on maternal identity in pregnant women

Purpose The objective of this study was to identify the factors influencing maternal identity in pregnant women. Methods Using a descriptive research design, a cross-sectional survey was conducted. In total, 127 pregnant women were recruited from a tertiary hospital in Korea from January to April 2019. Measurements included maternal identity, stress, depression, spousal and familial support, and demographic and obstetric characteristics. Data were analyzed by descriptive statistics, the independent t-test, one-way ANOVA, Pearson correlation coefficients, and stepwise multiple regression using SPSS version 25.0. Results The mean score for maternal identity was 131.15 out of 160, and the mean scores for stress, depression, and spousal and familial support were 14.59 (out of 40), 6.82 (out of 30), and 109.04 (out of 132), respectively. Stress (r=–.38, p<.001), depression (r=–.37, p<.001), and spousal and familial support (r=.37, p<.001) were significantly correlated with maternal identity. In multiple regression analysis, stress (β=–0.27, p=.005) and spousal and familial support (β=0.23, p=.014) were found to be significant factors influencing maternal identity in pregnant women (F=14.19, p<.001). Conclusion It is necessary to develop effective strategies to mitigate stress and to encourage spousal and familial support in pregnant women. Such strategies could further enable pregnant women to enhance their maternal identity

HERMES: Efficient Ring Packing using MLWE Ciphertexts and Application to Transciphering

Most of the current fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) schemes are based on either the learning-with-errors (LWE) problem or on its ring variant (RLWE) for storing plaintexts. During the homomorphic computation of FHE schemes, RLWE formats provide high throughput when considering several messages, and LWE formats provide a low latency when there are only a few messages. Efficient conversion can bridge the advantages of each format. However, converting LWE formats into RLWE format, which is called ring packing, has been a challenging problem. We propose an efficient solution for ring packing for FHE. The main improvement of this work is twofold. First, we accelerate the existing ring packing methods by using bootstrapping and ring switching techniques, achieving practical runtimes. Second, we propose a new method for efficient ring packing, HERMES, by using ciphertexts in Module-LWE (MLWE) formats, to also reduce the memory. To this end, we generalize the tools of LWE and RLWE formats for MLWE formats. On a single-thread implementation, HERMES consumes $10.2$s for the ring packing of $2^{15}$ LWE-format ciphertexts into an RLWE-format ciphertext. This gives $41$x higher throughput compared to the state-of-the-art ring packing for FHE, PEGASUS [S&P\u2721], which takes $51.7$s for packing $2^{12}$ LWE ciphertexts with similar homomorphic capacity. We also illustrate the efficiency of HERMES by using it for transciphering from LWE symmetric encryption to CKKS fully homomorphic encryption, significantly outperforming the recent proposals HERA [Asiacrypt\u2721] and Rubato [Eurocrypt\u2722]

Toward Green Synthesis of Graphene Oxide Using Recycled Sulfuric Acid via Couette-Taylor Flow

Developing eco-friendly and cost-effective processes for the synthesis of graphene oxide (GO) is essential for its widespread industrial applications. In this work, we propose a green synthesis technique for GO production using recycled sulfuric acid and filter-processed oxidized natural graphite obtained from a Couette-Taylor flow reactor. The viscosity of reactant mixtures processed from Couette-Taylor flow was considerably lower (???200 cP at 25 ??C) than that of those from Hummers&apos; method, which enabled the simple filtration process. The filtered sulfuric acid can be recycled and reused for the repetitive GO synthesis with negligible differences in the as-synthesized GO qualities. This removal of sulfuric acid has great potential in lowering the overall GO production cost as the amount of water required during the fabrication process, which takes a great portion of the total production cost, can be dramatically reduced after such acid filtration. The proposed eco-friendly GO fabrication process is expected to promote the commercial application of graphene materials into industry shortly