World Bank Discussion Paper No. 292. Examines the anatomy of the Republic of Korea's financial reform policy since 1979 in order to place the nation's financial reform plan of 1993 in a proper context. Financial deregulation in the Republic of Korea, initiated in 1979, coincided with similar programs in South America and East Asia. The reforms were successful in spite of a mild form of financial repression and a deregulation policy that ran an erratic course. The republic moved decisively in 1993 toward a conventional type of financial liberalization by announcing a blueprint of reforms to be implemented over a five-year period ending in 1997. This paper examines the anatomy of the Korean financial reform policy since 1979 in order to place its financial reform plan of 1993 in the proper context. The report presents a conceptual framework of the Korean financial system and policies, examines interest rate reforms on various levels, and discusses changes in the credit allocation system that were undertaken in earlier phases of the reforms. The book goes on to review the rationale of the final financial reform phase, the sequencing of its various elements, and the assessment. Broad conclusions are presented.

After years of strong performance, Korea’s economy entered a crisis in 1997, owing largely to structural problems in its financial and corporate sectors. These problems emerged in the second half of that year, when the capital inflows that had helped finance Korea’s growth were reversed, as foreign investors—reeling from losses in other Southeast Asian economies—decided to reduce their exposure to Korea. This paper focuses on the sources of the crisis that originated in the financial sector, the measures taken to deal with it, and the evolution of key banking and financial variables in its aftermath.

The increased mobility and volume of international capital flows is a striking trend in international finance. While countries worldwide have engaged in financial deregulation, nowhere is this pattern more pronounced than in East Asia, where it has affected in unanticipated ways the behavior of exchange rates, interest rates, and capital flows. In these thirteen essays, American and Asian scholars analyze the effects of financial deregulation and integration on East Asian markets. Topics covered include the roles of the United States and Japan in trading with Asian countries, macroeconomic policy implications of export-led growth in Korea and Taiwan, the effects of foreign direct investment in China, and the impact of financial liberalization in Japan, Korea, and Singapore. Demonstrating the complexity of financial deregulation and the challenges it poses for policy makers, this volume provides an excellent picture of the overall status of East Asian financial markets for scholars in international finance and Asian economic development.

Korea's financial development has been a tale of liberalization and opening but the new system has failed to steer the country away from financial crises. This study analyzes the changes in the financial system and finds that financial liberalization has contributed little to grow and stabilize the Korean economy.

In this sprawling and ambitious book John Braithwaite successfully manages to link the contemporary dynamics of macro political economy to the dynamics of citizen engagement and organisational activism at the micro intestacies of governance practices. This is no mean feat and the logic works. . . Stephen Bell, The Australian Journal of Public Administration Everyone who is puzzled by modern regulocracy should read this book. Short and incisive, it represents the culmination of over twenty years work on the subject. It offers us a perceptive and wide-ranging perspective on the global development of regulatory capitalism and an important analysis of points of leverage for democrats and reformers. Christopher Hood, All Souls College, Oxford, UK It takes a great mind to produce a book that is indispensable for beginners and experts, theorists and policymakers alike. With characteristic clarity, admirable brevity, and his inimitable mix of description and prescription, John Braithwaite explains how corporations and states regulate each other in the complex global system dubbed regulatory capitalism. For Braithwaite aficionados, Regulatory Capitalism brings into focus the big picture created from years of meticulous research. For Braithwaite novices, it is a reading guide that cannot fail to inspire them to learn more. Carol A. Heimer, Northwestern University, US Reading Regulatory Capitalism is like opening your eyes. John Braithwaite brings together law, politics, and economics to give us a map and a vocabulary for the world we actually see all around us. He weaves together elements of over a decade of scholarship on the nature of the state, regulation, industrial organization, and intellectual property in an elegant, readable, and indispensable volume. Anne-Marie Slaughter, Princeton University, US Encyclopedic in scope, chock full of provocative even jarring claims, Regulatory Capitalism shows John Braithwaite at his transcendental best. Ian Ayres, Yale Law School, Yale University, US Contemporary societies have more vibrant markets than past ones. Yet they are more heavily populated by private and public regulators. This book explores the features of such a regulatory capitalism, its tendencies to be cyclically crisis-ridden, ritualistic and governed through networks. New ways of thinking about resultant policy challenges are developed. At the heart of this latest work by John Braithwaite lies the insight by David Levi-Faur and Jacint Jordana that the welfare state was succeeded in the 1970s by regulatory capitalism. The book argues that this has produced stronger markets, public regulation, private regulation and hybrid private/public regulation as well as new challenges such as a more cyclical quality to crises of market and governance failure, regulatory ritualism and markets in vice. However, regulatory capitalism also creates opportunities for better design of markets in virtue such as markets in continuous improvement, privatized enforcement of regulation, open source business models, regulatory pyramids with networked escalation and meta-governance of justice. Regulatory Capitalism will be warmly welcomed by regulatory scholars in political science, sociology, history, economics, business schools and law schools as well as regulatory bureaucrats, policy thinkers in government and law and society scholars.

This book represents the first systematic attempt to explore the financial crisis in an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective and is essential reading for both policy-makers and academics interested in national governance.

This work identifies the continuing structural weaknesses of the Korean banking system, which were thrown into sharp relief by the 1997 financial crisis, and focuses on the need for reform in order to achieve financial stability. The study centres around three central questions: Who should be the regulator? What substantive standards of supervision should be applied? Administratively, in what manner should these standards be applied? The book argues that the Korean banking system, characterised as a `governmental control system' for credit allocation, should be removed from undue governmental and political interference, thus allowing the involvement of banks in commercially oriented practices without exposure to the significant risks incurred by governmental policy directed lending. The author calls for a high degree of transparency and accountability, for a clear, realistic timetable for restructuring, and for an effective exit policy for troubled commercial banks. This book will be of value to practitioners, researchers and academics working in the field of banking law, particularly those with a special interest in the Asia-Pacific region.