Is Seoul the Pound-for-Pound Champion of Information and Communication Service Growth?: A New Size-Free Shift-Share Approach

Abstract

As ICT has emerged as a general-purpose technology, interest in fostering the industry has also grown in non-capital areas. Consequently, the growth rate of the regional ICT service industry has become an important indicator for regional industrial policy. However, when comparing industrial growth across regions, conventional indicators are affected by initial size, making it difficult to assess whether a region's growth is relatively higher than that of others. To address this limitation, this study proposes a size-free shift-share analysis (SSA) and applies the method to Korean ICT service data. The analysis confirms that, while the ICT service industry is indeed quantitatively concentrated in the capital region, such as Seoul, adjusting for initial size reveals that many non-capital regions have achieved ICT service growth surpassing that of the capital region.