2013, Vol.22, No.2

Journal of Regulation Studies 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.78

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

Regulatory goals tend to be set as high as possible, and its instruments chosen as strong as possible. This tendency is usually justified on such ground that regulations designed as such must accomplish regulatory goals most effectively. This study casts strong doubt about this naive belief. Paying particular attention to the inherent vagueness and lack of concreteness of policy goals in nature and the typical behavior both on the part of regulators and the regulated at the stage of regulatory enforcement, and also taking cognizance of the utmost strong influence that resources constraints exert at this stage, this study argues, from the perspective of incremental approach, that such a synoptic approach to regulatory goal setting must end up with greater dissatisfaction, for those regulations designed in such a fashion—mostly input standards in sort—would only further increase unreasonableness of regulations. In the spirit of incremental approach, this study suggests an alternative way of setting regulatory goals in such a manner as to make “X% improvement from the status quo”—which can be derived from an expert survey or international comparisons of states achieved under current regulatory structures of advanced countries—a realistic goal to be achieved next year. This method would help increase economic efficiency of allocating limited resources available for regulatory enforcement, set policy priorities right in the midst of unending requests for ever higher regulatory goals from the society, and make it far easier to appraise and compare the levels of achievement of regulatory goals.

Since 1981, Korea has maintained an unique regulatory framework on economic concentration. While most countries manage competition laws to discipline the market concentration and its subsequent problems, Korea rather focuses on restraining the aggregate concentration, esp. the economic power of the big chaebols. Recently the inhospitality tradition against the business groups is being aggravated mostly due to the political rhetoric of economic democratization propagated during the 18th presidential race in 2012. Why has the economic concentration been so much social concern in Korea? What makes the Korea specific regulation persistent and even stricter in the globalization era of open competition? In this paper we evaluate the logics and myths behind the regulation in the contexts of economic theory and history. We also estimate theoretically consistent measures of concentration of the 30 large chaebols and test the corporate hegemony hypothesis, using the data of employments, sales, assets, and diversification indices. The major finding is that various measures used in previous literatures have a feature of ‘quick-and-dirty ones’ in that they lead to significantly upward biases up to 60 percent and a misleading interpretation in the long-term change of economic concentration.

This study aims at analyzing trend of regulatory studies in regulatory theory and regulatory policy in Korea. For this purpose, it conducts a content analysis of 280 articles published in 「the Journal of Regulation Studies」 from 1992 to 2012, focusing on not only subject of researches but also researcher's orientation and perspectives on regulatory reform. The main results are as follows. First of all, regarding regulation theory, the market-oriented and traditional claims were generally accepted. Second, many studies expressed the negative view on regulation or the government's intervention. Third, the political economic perspectives of regulation such as the capture of regulatory bureaucrats, the private interest in regulation, the demand for regulation and so on were received generally . Fourth, the general trust in regulatory policy in advanced countries and Korea showed a contrasting result. Finally, there were the gap between the background expertise of researchers like public administration and economics of the legitimacy of regulation, the role of government, etc. and the difference of stance on deregulation and the inefficiency of government intervention.