Consolidating Public Sector Reform through Policy Transfer in Korea: Global Diffusion and Local Control

Abstract

In Korea, demands for economic and social democratization increasedafter 2000, as the country dealt with economic recession after the 1997 Asianfinancial crisis and with other problems resulting from mismanaged domesticpolicies. In response, the Korean state carried out unprecedented reform of thepublic sector to address these problems by streamlining state capacity. Theprimary objectives of this article are to understand Korean public sector reformtogether with its domestic political factors from a policy transfer perspective,and to suggest an alternate model for the reforms. The reforms, which took placeduring the Kim Dae-Jung and the Roh Mu-Hyun administrations, were consolidatedthrough proactive policy transfer by politico-bureaucratic decisions inorder to establish a new statecraft despite the global diffusion of policy trends.Investigation of its domestic political circumstances and historical contextreveals that the reforms were not direct emulations of global norms, but ratheran attempt to use a mixture of models to raise the quality of government.