Trends and mechanisms of corruption in South Korea

ABSTRACT

Corruption remains one of the key obstacles to democratization and good governance. Given the nature of the subject, corruption is notoriously difficult to study. International comparisons and rankings of good governance such as the World Bank World Governance Indicators, the Bertelsmann Sustainable Governance Index, or Transparency International's Global Corruption Index are very useful for providing the big picture on corruption. To understand trends and mechanisms of corruption, however, it is necessary to conduct case studies on both successful and failed cases of anti-corruption policies. This paper investigates the successes and challenges of the fight against corruption in South Korea since the beginning of democratization in 1987. The investigation shows that Korea has generally been successful in controlling corruption. The paper argues that the remaining problems can be largely explained by the legacy of authoritarian rule and the undermining of state autonomy through the concentration of economic power.

KEYWORDS:

• Corruption
• good governance
• democratization
• East Asia
• South Korea

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Soeun Kim for her invaluable support in the research for an earlier version of this paper that I presented at a workshop of the ANTICORRP Consortium at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg in October 2013. Many thanks to Thomas Richter and the participants of the workshop as well as two anonymous reviewers of the Pacific Review for their valuable feedback that helped me to improve this paper. Finally thanks to Aurel Croissant and Heidelberg University that hosted me during my sabbatical in 2015 during which I revised this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. According to Park (2008: 36), rents are the ‘changes in the proportion allocated to different functional budgetary categories after the effects of rational determinants, political and economic determinants and incremental determinants in each functional budget category were eliminated’. A modified method developed by Katz and Rosenberg (1989) was used to estimate the share of rent-seeking in the study. Please note that the study only focused on measuring the share of rent-seeking in government budget allocation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas Kalinowski

Thomas Kalinowski is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Graduate School of International Studies, Ewha Womans University in Seoul, Korea. He is teaching International Political Economy, Comparative Political Economy, International Organizations and Development. After receiving his Ph.D. from Freie Universität Berlin in 2004, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California in Berkeley and a visiting assistant professor at Brown University, Providence. His recent publications include works on financial crisis, financial regulation and bank reform, the IMF, the global role of East Asia, the diversity of capitalism, and the transformation of the East Asian developmental state. Currently, Professor Kalinowski is working on a book about the international regulation of finance. You can follow his research at www.researchgate.net/profile/Thomas_Kalinowski.