Due to the development of advanced information, scientific technique and transportation, the world today is in the process of globalization. Globalization here implies that the mutual dependence between nations in all fields such as politics, economy, society and culture became deepened. Due to such mutual dependence, not only individuals, but also nations can no longer live by oneself; the survival and prosperity are pursued through exchanges and trades with other nations. Hence nations today are influenced by direct exchanges and trades with other nations, in addition to indirect incidents happening outside of nation's territory.
Although Korea is a peninsular state, it is no different from a maritime nation, for overland expansion is almost impossible. If sea lane is blocked by piracy, national economy and security would be in great danger, for the economical means of processing and exporting the imported crude oil and raw materials is adopted. If sea lane is blocked for Korea, the supply and demand of energy would be ceased first and most of national industry and economical activities like petrochemistry, steel manufacture, manufacturing, construction and such would be paralyzed.
From this aspect, trading plays the role of sustaining economical activities for Korea, and is directly related to national security. Although various transportation means like overland transportation and air transportation are used for trades between nations, marine transportation is of the greatest importance. With the comparative advantage of transferring items "all at once to long distance with lower shipping fee", it takes up 90% of the worldwide shipments and more than 99.7% of Korea's exporting and importing container traffic. With such reason, securing the safety of the sea route SLOC for marine transportation is very important for national security as well as national prosperity.
Recently, among the ones threatening SLOC, piracy has been occurring considerably frequentiy and is recognized as the major threat. According to International Maritime Bureau(IMB), a total of 5,195 piracy incidents occurred in the jurisdictions of 86 nations, 14 international waters and international straits from 1991 to June 2010. Especially, the major damages of the piracy occurred from 2007 to June 2010 include 147 kidnapped ships, 2,830 detained crewmen, 25 deaths, 151 injured and 32 missing. Piracy is thought as the greatest threat for SLOC today. Since the piracy continues to occur despite the effort of the international society, in—depth analysis on the causes of piracy is demanded as a fundamental measure to reduce damages by pirates.
Most of the existing studies related to occurrence of piracy suggest the economical factor as the essential cause of piracy. That is to say the dominant cause of piracy is poverty and piracy provides the opportunity to overcome such. Nevertheless, it lacks persuasive power to explain the cause of piracy only with economical reasons. Hence recently, arguments that various factors such as political, social, environmental, historical and cultural factors cause piracy are brought up. However, such studies lack persuasive power, for they are only assumed descriptions of the causes, rather than filed investigations or researches based on empirical data. This paper is to scientifically analyze the causes of piracy through empirical research, using the actual data. To scientifically investigate the causes of piracy, regression analysis using SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Science) 12K program was applied in the paper. The regression analysis was carried on by setting Number of Piracy Incident(NPI) as the dependent variable, and the factors affecting the causes of piracy as independent variable.
The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the common cause of piracy and find the correlation of Number of Piracy Incident(NPI) and factors. Concretely, it is to deduce correlation coefficient value r and regression method, and correlation coefficient value r can be applied as the standard to evaluate and confirm the relationship between NPI and factors. This NPI is set as the dependent variable of this paper and the factors influencing the occurrence of pirates from the existing studies are set as the independent variables. The independent variables mfluencing NPI in the paper are National Political and Social Factor(NPSF), National Economic Factor(NEF), National Maritime Power Factor(NMPF) and Maritime Environment Factor(MEF). The modeling for analysis is set like the following.
NPIt = f(NPSFt~t-2, NEFt~t-2, NMPFt~t-2, MEFt).........................(1)
* Since it is hard to acquire nation's yearly data on MEF, it is analyzed separately.
In the above formula (1), t implies the point of time(yearly unit) when each factor has the greatest impact on NPI. Nevertheless, there is a limit to generalize the application point t through the existing study. Although piracy is a representative social phenomenon, it occurs at different times due to the environmental difference of regions and nations, and t can differ by each nation. Hence this paper is to individually calculate the application point t of each factor.
Also, as for the method of each factor influencing NPI, it is shown that each factor continues to have influence on the occurrence of piracy, reaches the peak at one point and has less influence later. If the application period of application point t is not limited in this case, the correlation coefficient value r relatively higher than the number of piracy occurrence can be deduced. However, in case the value t is higher than 5 or 10 years, one would wonder whether to rely on such result, even if the correlation coefficient value r is calculated to be high. Hence the application point t is to be limited in the range of t ~ t-2 in this paper, for if the value t is not limited, the reliability on the result decreases. That is to say, the limitation of time for the independent variable to influence the dependent variable, piracy, is to be limited to 2 years.
As the result of the thesis, the following significant facts were discovered in relation to the causes of piracy. First, National Economic Factor(NEF) was dominantly argued in relation to the cause of piracy in the existing studies. However, We found that National Political and Social Factor (NPSF), National Maritime Power Factor(NMPF) and Maritime Environment Factor(MEF) also affect piracy incidents
Second, this thesis makes the foundation of deducing piracy with effect. It studies the happening factor of piracy through 6 steps and analyses them through statistics method as regression. As the result of this method, We found that the happening factors of piracy show a little difference in accordance with analysis method and the subject of one's study as each nation, region, group so on. therefore the effect of deducing piracy with effect need to push forward on nation, region, group, world ground.
Third, we analysis point of time about the happening factor of piracy. This study is first and important on the further piracy study. We found that National Political and Social Factor(NPSF) is t and t—1, National Economic Factor (NEF) is t and National Maritime Power Factor(NMPF) is t-2. This result assist on the deterrnining period of policy.
Forth, we found the result that piracy occurs more ① when the correlation coefficient value r of certain factor is great, ② when the sum of correlation coefficient of factors is great, ③ when the number of factors meeting the hypothesis can be deduced. Hence the efforts to eradicate pirates need to be made with flexibility by focusing on certain factors according to the causes of piracy of nations or focusing on multiple factors at the same time.