The Effect of the Korean Robot Act on the Korean Robotics Industry and Its Implications

The Act on The Promotion of the Development and Distribution of Intelligent Robots (hereafter the Korean Robot Act) was launched in 2008 and under the act, various policies have been adopted to promote the Korean robotics industry. According to previous quantitative assessments, through creating robot demand, the Korean Robot Act has contributed to the formation of an early-stage of the Korean robot market. The act also supported the establishment of the test-bed facilities and promoted research and development (R&D) investment in the robotics industry. Despite various contributions the law has made, it is to be abolished in 2018. While the gap in the robotic technology between Korea and developed countries started to shrink recently, the Korean robotics market is in the early-stage of the market life-cycle. In this regard, the Korean Robot Law plays an important role for advancing the Korean robotic technology and sharpening the Korea’s competitiveness in the global robot market.The Korean robotics market is smaller than the Chinese market, and the robotic technology of Korea is behind that of China. Hence, there has been a need to review the effectiveness of the Korean Robot Act and how to revise the act to find new promotion strategies for the Korean robotics industry.The rest of the paper consists of three more chapters. On the second chapter, we evaluated the robot promotion policies’ effects on the performance of the Korean robotics industry under the Korean Robot Act, and such effects on the total robots produced in Korea and its induced effects. In the third chapter, we forecasted the Korean and global robotics market in the near future. In the last chapter, we used the study results in the two previous chapters to conclude the importance of the Korean Robot Act and the implications policies have for the development of the Korean robotics industry