■ Charting a New Path to Tangible Growth● Jeonbuk’s ninth elected administration has shifted its policy focus from quantitative expansion to “tangible growth,” ensuring that business growth translates into local sales, jobs, and income. Delivering on this agenda will require a new implementation model that drives substantive economic activity across the region.
● In particular, Jeonbuk must move beyond fostering businesses and industries and create a virtuous cycle that brings locally produced goods to domestic and global markets. Local logistics, distribution, and service providers should play an active role in this process, channeling the resulting economic gains back into the regional economy.
■ Why Now: New Competing Routes and a Turning Point for Gunsan Port’s Competitiveness
● The planned Daesan–Shidao international car ferry service could draw cargo originating in Gyeonggi and Chungcheong away from the Gunsan–Shidao route, potentially weakening the competitiveness of local carriers. Ahead of its launch, Jeonbuk needs a strategy to prevent the diversion of existing cargo to competing routes while generating new export cargo within the province.
● Gunsan Port’s competitiveness must evolve beyond traditional hardware-based strengths, including dredging, water depth, and port facilities, to integrated software-based capabilities that connect cargo generation, logistics routes, international shipping services, and local networks.
■ JB Road for Tangible Growth: An Implementation Model Linking Jeonbuk to Global Markets
● JB Road is a comprehensive export and logistics business network that integrates Jeonbuk’s industrial and logistics infrastructure, export and logistics support programs, international shipping routes, and overseas networks into a single pathway, enabling products from Jeonbuk businesses to gain seamless
● JB Road Makers are central to this model, coordinating and executing key stages of the export process that SMEs often struggle to manage independently—from market development and local certification to buyer identification, contracting, customs clearance, and logistics. This marks an expansion of the policy domain from “export support” to “export execution.”
■ What It Takes to Succeed: Blazing Trails, Managing Operations, and Turning Opportunities into Transactions
● Delivering a successful JB Road model requires five critical success factors: effective global governance among local governments, a well-functioning operating system centered on the Jeonbuk Integrated Export Support Center, JB Road Makers with proven expertise, sustained cargo flows and market access, and repeat business and private-sector self-sufficiency.
● Jeonbuk State should work with overseas local governments to forge new pathways. Local support organizations and industry and logistics players should operate these pathways, while JB Road Makers turn opportunities into transactions. This model should evolve into a market-friendly structure that sustains repeat exports.
■ From Jeonbuk–Shandong to Global JB Road: Charting a New Path to Tangible Growth
● The Jeonbuk–Shandong JB Road, built around the Gunsan–Shidao international car ferry service, should serve as the first demonstration model, with an initial focus on generating small but repeatable transactions. The model can then be extended to other parts of China, Gunsan Port’s existing international routes serving Japan and Southeast Asia, and eventually the new Saemangeum Port.
● The goal is to build a virtuous cycle of (1) increasing exports and sales by Jeonbuk businesses, (2) driving the growth of local logistics, shipping, and service providers, (3) boosting cargo volumes at Gunsan Port, (4) expanding employment and income opportunities, and (5) channeling economic gains back into the regional economy. In this way, JB Road should become a global network asset that Jeonbuk businesses can leverage over the long term, opening a new pathway to tangible growth.
