The Korea Local Administration Review

Recently, Korea has faced two ominous indicators: the nationalcompetitiveness index and social conflict index. The national competitivenessindex has been stagnated or dropped, whereas the social conflict Indexrecorded very high among OECD countries. We conjectured the crumbling twoindices were resulted from the inefficiency in public sector and lack ofgovernmental capacity to mitigate social conflicts. The major causes for suchinefficiency lie in the centralized power structure which weakened the operationof the check and balance mechanism among the government branches as wellas between national and sub-national governments. Particularly, the centralizedpresidential system has strengthened vertical control of both governmentadministration and even of congress and judicial body. We found that manycountries with high national competitiveness and low social conflicts are mostlyunder the governance system of cooperation and sub-national autonomy.Therefore, we propose that Korea adopt a decentralized governance system tosolve current pressing problems. To do so requires to adopt ‘the TriadModel’ of decentralized governance system: decentralized regional autonomy,local representative bicameral system, decentralized presidential system. Wealso insist that adoption of new system must be implemented in order that aninstitutional complementarity would be maintained. It is with the adoption of thistype governance system that Korea would be able to solve dual problems oflow national competitiveness and high social conflicts.
□ Keywords: Government Competitiveness, Social Conflict Index, CentralizedGovernance System, Institutional Complementarity