Policy-Making Process in Korea: The Enactment Process of the Monopoly Regulation and Fair Trade Act

Abstract

Three dominant perspectives on the origin of regulation (the public mterest model, the capture model, and the politics model) and four models of governmental decision-making (the rational actor model, the organizational process model, the governmental politics model, and the garbage can model) are utilized in order to investigate the enactment process. This article argues that the failure to enact monpoly regulation and fair trade legislation during the 1960's and 1970's can be attributed mainly to the faithful implementation of economic development plans by the Park regime and to the public endorsement of those plans. The enactment of the MRFTA in 1980, however, is ascribed less to a problem-solving kind of activity within the Korean government and more to a temporal simultaneity of the political needs of the new milltary leadership and a few reform-minded career bureaucrats within the EPB.