Coordinating Public Enterprises in Korea

Abstract

As A. F. Hanson pointed out, "both in industry and agriculture the story of Turkish economic development has been very largely one of state enterprise. Not only in Turkey but also in many other developing countries, public enterprises have an essential role to play in the developmental process. One of the problems which arise from the proliferation of public enterprises in the developmental process in many activities. There are relatively small number of public enterprises in Korea compared with many other Asian countries, and the Government Invested Enterprise Management Law, which was promulgated in 1973, gave some uniformities in controlling public enterprises such as the terms of appointment of executives and the appointing process of public enterprises. However, need for coordinating policies and practice of different public enterprises still remains. This paper may be divided into three parts. The first part Chps(Ⅱ and Ⅲ) is devoted to overview and organizational forms of public enterprises in Korea. The second part(Chapter Ⅳ) is concerned with existing processes and organs of control and coordination. The third part (Chapter Ⅴ) deals with ways and means for more effective coordination of public enterprises. In the first part of this paper, public enterprises which take the form of government department are included in the second and the third parts of the paper. In gathering the data upon which this study is based, the writer has had to rely to rely to a large extent on the cooperation of Korean Government officials and executives of public enterprises in granting interviews and allowing access to unpublished materials because of the scarcity of published sources on the topic under discussion.