S. Korea ‘bureaucracy risk’ derails economic innovation

April 9, 2014 Leave a comment

S. Korea ‘bureaucracy risk’ derails economic innovation

2014.03.26 17:51:09

The ‘bureaucracy risk’ is re-surfacing in South Korea. President Park Geun-hye continues to call for a three-year economic innovation plan and regulation reform, but civil servants at the central and local governments who are in charge of implementing such plan and reform still remain mired in outdated practices. 
Private experts are increasingly voicing the need to reform bureaucracy first before tackling economic innovation and regulation reform.
In a poll of economists and public administration scholars by the Maeil Business Newspaper, Korean top brass lack credibility, competency, communication skills and mobility.
One of the prime examples is the government’s real estate stimulus packages, including the recent measure seeking to improve the housing rent market. “A host of the government’s latest property measures are an incomplete package that hastily combined one to two policies,” said Cho Won-hee, professor at Kookmin University and one of 41 respondents.
Government officials’ policy execution capacity also came under fire. In the past, 90 percent or more of the policies proposed by the government had been approved by the National Assembly and came into effect. But the percentage fell to 30 percent since 2010, with the remaining policies discarded, as bureaucrats lost both the capacity to convince the Presidential Office and the government and creativity to develop new policies. Equally serious are the lethargy plaguing officials and their lack of communication capacity.

Filed under Macro Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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