Journal of Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers ISSN:1738-3692(Print) 2093-7709(Online) 한국농공학회논문집

Rural tourism has been identified as providing opportunities to revitalize the rural economies since early 2000s. During last decade in South Korea, government has enacted many policies aiming to establish tourism support programs as well as instigating activities between rural and nearby urban districts. In particular, the promotion of the rural tourism has been actively sought in various forms of products and services, such as green tourism village, village festival, one-company one-village campaign and etc. However, in order to prepare effective policies, it is very crucial to identify measureable evaluation criteria that can be used to assess socio-economic situations of the rural districts. Such criteria should be objective, timely and provide insights about living conditions of local residents and relevant properties. They can also be used to evaluate if progress is being made after the policies are implemented. While considerable efforts and resources have been invested to aid the tourism programs in South Korea, we still lack such systematic means to quantify and evaluate its impact on rural districts. In this work, we have applied regional deprivation analysis on well-established community experiential and recreational business in rural villages throughout the country based on three criteria (i.e., population, local commerce, and buildings). Surprisingly, the result shows that the implementation of the community experiential and recreational businesses did not bring any noticeable changes to at least one of the evaluation criteria. We concluded that the current government policies on revitalization of rural tourism at the village scale is insufficient for bringing meaningful socio-economic impacts to rural districts, with rare exceptions.