논문

Since the early 1960s, the Korean government put forward strong economic
policies focused on large-scale chemical and heavy industries. This approach
was highly successful by the mid-1980s. However, the approach lost its
comparative advantage as the competition from other developing countries, such
as China, has rapidly increased since the mid-1980s. The Korean government
shifted its strategy to promote small-scale high technology venture firms,
especially after the current government launched its governance after the 1997
economic crisis. Many local governments, under the recently decentralized
government system, also created various policies and programs to assist high
technology venture firms, attempting to strengthen their local economies. This
paper examines the approaches that the Korean local governments took to assist
high technology venture firms. The paper concludes that there existed serious
over-investments led by policies confusion among various ministries and
governments. The paper suggests, first, that various policies and programs
created by individual ministries and local governments have to be coordinated by
a certain agency to make governmental approaches more effective and, second,
that each ministry and government must develop their own specialized roles of
promoting the high technology industries.