The Korea Local Administration Review

This paper is to analyze organizational management practices of localgovernments in Japan and to draw some implications for Korean localgovernments. The findings are as follows. First, Japanese local governmentshave had autonomy in running their bodies based mainly on their own by-laws.Second, there has grown competition among local governments. Japanese centralgovernment has induced intergovernmental competitions through indirectinvolvement in operations of local governments, which has encouragedmanagerial diversity among them. Third, several measures for activeinformation disclosure have been employed to hold in check the increasedautonomy of local governments. Growing information disclosure in terms ofwidth and depth, for example, by adopting “the integrated information system ofsalaries and number of regular employees of local governments” h as impro vedcontrols as well as understandings on local administrative organizations byresidents. The research results give useful implications for improvingmanagerial practices of Korean local governments such as implementing ongoingorganizational diagnoses, devising information disclosure system, and enlargingincentive structures for better organizational management, which means thatKorean central government needs to turn into indirect ways of intervention inlocal governments.