공산품 규제에 관한 소비자의 인식: 소비자 인지, 기대, 필요성 인식을 중심으로

Abstract

As the cases that consumers’ financial, physical, or life security are harmed by insecure industrial products are increasing in recent years, constant and coherent policies to control industrial products are required. The final aim of the regulations on industrial products is to minimize the consumer problems and improve the quality of life by controlling the quality and safety of the products. However, consumers have only limited opportunities to offer suggestions on the policies for the product regulations. Contrary to the consumers’ limited opportunities to participate in making and improving the policies related to the products in general, the companies have more chances to propose the improvement of the regulations. It is because the organizations that represent companies interests, such as the Federation of Korean Industries (FKI), can gather the opinions from every industry and propose improvement or reformation of regulations, which makes bigger glomerates of power. This study focused on this imbalanced opportunities to advocate views on the regulations and systems for industrial products. The purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness and relevance of regulations on industrial products, focusing on some issues which are closely related with consumers from consumers’ viewpoint. First of all, nine consumer issues were extracted from the proposal of the FKI for the reformation and improvement of regulations in the year of 2014. The nine issues include suggested period labeling for safe use, energy efficiency management system, consumer electronics recycling system, toxic chemicals control for child goods, certification of green technology, use refurbish components for warranted repairs, registration of chemicals, punitive damage reimbursement for insecure industrial products. For these nine regulation issues, consumers’ awareness, expectations, and recognized necessity were investigated by comparing to the companies’ requirements from the proposal of the FKI. The results showed that the consumers have conflicting opinions on the safety issues that consumers have difficulties to examine the safety of industrial products due to the lack of expertise in general. The level of the recognized necessity of each regulation was influenced by the consumers’ awareness, expectation, and general attitudes toward regulations. This study examined consumers’ opinions on product regulations and tried to extend the scope of the discussion about regulations on industrial products to embrace consumers as major stakeholder for making and improving the product regulations. Based on the result of this study, the viewpoint of consumers as final users of the regulated products will be reflected to examine the effectiveness and relevance of the regulations.