2010, Vol.19, No.1

Journal of Regulation Studies 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.78

pISSN : 1738-7132
https://journal.kci.go.kr/ksrs2002

There are over 300 public entities with a separate legal identity and substantial autonomy from the central government in Korea. For several decades there have been fundamental conceptual arguments within the Korean profession on the proper management systems on the distributed public entities. This paper argues on the concept of transaction costs in order to understand the organisational map of public sector. It is argued to be reasonable to expect that, over the long run, transaction cost-minimizing forms of organization will come to dominate in the government and public sector. As a powerful means to minimize the transaction costs on managing public entities, performance contracting and performance agreements between the government and public entities should be used more widely in Korea.

It is Market studies (or market investigation or sector inquiry) that investigates and evaluates how a specific market/industry works. Several antitrust authorities in advanced countries actively and widely conduct its inquiry into a particular sector or market of the economy when there are some evidences indicating that competition may be restricted or distorted. Market study is one of the important antitrust authority tools and is quite complementary to antitrust enforcement. This paper studies how other advanced countries such as US, UK, and EC conduct market studies and finds implications for Korean antitrust authority.

Expecting heavy regulations on essential facilities ex post, firms may avoid or delay socially beneficial investment projects on infrastructure. For example, although the prospect for next generation network (NGN) has been blooming for quite a while, regulators in many countries have had difficult times to persuade operators to invest in fiber optic access networks. It has been proposed that the investment risks faced by operators should be reduced by exempting newly deployed networks from access regulation, awarding “regulatory holidays” to operators. However, those who oppose to this idea claim that there is no need for allowing monopoly exploitation, because the same goal can be achieved by allowing constant risk premium under regulation. In this paper, I survey the recent debate on this issue and devise a simple theoretical model to compare two approaches. It is shown that, while constant risk premium approach is generally better in terms of maximizing social welfare, there are some cases in which regulatory holidays is optimal.