What Busan Doesn't Measure

18 Questions for Next Busan · Day 9 of 18

Hyunseung Kim (Gray) · May 28, 2026

The numbers Busan is proud of

Busan measures many things about itself.

World's fifth largest container port (DNV·Menon, 2025). Seventh by container volume (2024 TEU). Busan International Film Festival attendance. Registered foreign residents. Quarterly youth out-migration. Regional GDP. Annual employment surveys — all published, updated, and available on the city's two open data portals.

These numbers are measured for a simple reason. A department is responsible. An annual release is required. The figures are externally comparable.

So what does the list of unmeasured things say?

This essay's answer is plain. The list of what Busan doesn't measure is nearly identical to the list of where Busan hasn't built trust infrastructure.

What the proverb missed

There is an old business proverb. What you can't measure, you can't manage. What you can't manage, you can't improve. It is usually attributed to Peter Drucker. The Drucker Institute itself has confirmed he never said it. The origin is a 1956 paper by the management scholar V. F. Ridgway, who was not advocating measurement but warning against its indiscriminate use.

The proverb survived; the warning was forgotten. So businesses and cities fall into the same trap. What can be measured becomes what matters, and what matters but cannot be easily measured disappears. Quarterly revenue is measured. Customer trust is hard to measure. The list of businesses that chased revenue and lost trust is long. Container throughput is measured. Citizen trust is hard to measure. Cities take the same road.

A city's core asset is not a measurable number. It is the depth of trust running between residents, builders, and visitors. Trust itself cannot be measured directly. It can only be measured by its results — who stayed, who came back, who came again.

The proverb must be inverted. Measurement does not produce operation. Trust produces operation, and measurement is the tool that tracks whether trust is growing. Used as anything more, measurement deceives — a stack of business cards becomes mistaken for a depth of relationships. Used as nothing at all, you cannot tell whether trust is growing or collapsing in your own city.

The list of what Busan doesn't measure

Look at the city's open data portals, and what is measured is plain. What is not measured is equally plain.

Container throughput is measured. The youth share of port jobs is not. Busan is the world's fifth-largest port, but whether that port is a workplace young people trust is absent from the statistics.

Film festival attendance is measured. The number of filmmakers who decided to live in Busan after the festival is not. Attendance is a visit. Residence is the result of trust, and the latter is not tracked.

Foreign tourist arrivals are measured. Length of stay and one-year retention rates are not. Busan knows who arrived. It does not know who stayed.

Out-migration of people in their twenties is measured. Local broadcaster Busan MBC reported 4,480 net youth out-migrants in the first half of 2025 alone. But the return rate — how many of those who left over the past decade have re-registered in Busan — is not measured. Leaving may reflect the absence of jobs. Not returning is something else.

The count of new corporate tenants is measured. Builder density — sole proprietors per capita, coworking spaces, makerspaces, new registrations — sits scattered across departments and is never assembled in one place. There is no single index of how many people decided to build something here this quarter.

Post-event tourism revenue is measured. Price volatility during major events, booking cancellation rates, visitor trust indices — these are not. When BTS plays Busan and leaves, the city will release the economic impact figure. It will not release how much trust the city lost during those two weeks. Because it has never measured that.

Each line touches one of the previous essays in this series. The diagnoses from Q1 to Q8 — why the young leave, how a city works with zero top-100 headquarters, who Busan can keep — converge on a single observation. The areas Busan doesn't measure are the areas where Busan hasn't built trust infrastructure. And because they aren't measured, the absence isn't visible.

What Fukuoka measured was not a number

In Q6 we looked at Fukuoka's thirteen years. Go one step deeper, and the real reason Fukuoka grew strong was not that it measured numbers. What Fukuoka measured was whether its city was trusted by outsiders. Nomad visa issuances, one- and two-year retention rates for foreign founders — these indicators are not important in themselves. They matter as evidence that guests stayed.

One of the largest reasons Busan is thirteen years behind is this: it never built the instruments to track whether trust was growing. Trust itself is invisible. The results of trust are measurable. Fukuoka measured the results. Busan didn't measure even those.

Four things the next Busan must begin to measure

As Ridgway warned in 1956, measurement is a tool. When the tool becomes the goal, it is dangerous. The number of business cards exchanged is not the depth of trust. But without the tool, you cannot tell whether trust is growing or collapsing.

What the next Busan must begin to measure are four indicators that track whether trust is growing inside the city. Regardless of who wins on June 3.

1. Stay indicator — did guests trust the city enough to stay? Number of foreign and Korean nomads in Busan for 30+ days. Long-stay program registrants. Average length of stay for short-term foreign residents. The first indicator that distinguishes visiting from staying.

2. Return indicator — did those who left come back? Number of Korean 20- and 30-somethings who left Busan in the past decade and have since re-registered as residents. Published annually. Those who returned are also part of a city's population, not only those who left.

3. Builder indicator — did builders trust Busan enough to build here? Quarterly trend of newly registered sole proprietors, corporations, and startups in Busan. Coworking and makerspace counts. A single index showing how much making is happening in this city.

4. Trust indicator — how were guests treated? Price volatility in accommodation, transport, and F&B during major events. Booking cancellation rates. Periodic satisfaction surveys of foreign and out-of-town visitors. An index of how Busan treated those who came.

None of the four measure trust directly. They measure the results of trust. That is the real role of measurement.

What is measured becomes visible. What is visible can change. The next Busan will be made of the things Busan begins to measure — and of the trust that begins to grow beyond what any measure can capture.

Busanloop · 18 Questions for Next Busan · Q9

Reference: V. F. Ridgway (1956). "Dysfunctional Consequences of Performance Measurements." Administrative Science Quarterly, 1(2), 240–247.