Economic Policies of Roh Administration Flunk in Evaluation

Economic policies of President Roh`s administration were evaluated as a near failure 150 days into office.

Adding more gloom to this was the fact that economic conditions were not forecast to improve notably in the near future.

The Dong A Il-bo released the results yesterday of a survey it recently conducted, which included 30 experts in academia, state and private think tanks, as well as leaders in industry, finance, and labor sectors.

Questioned on the government`s economic policies after its first 150 days in office, 56.7% responded negatively, while 13 respondents, or 43.3%, said that the performance was “overall poor,” and 4 respondents, or 13.4%, said “seriously poor”.

Thirteen respondents said the government`s economic policies to date were “acceptable,” but none of the people asked to participate in the survey used words or phrases like “excellent” or “generally good.”

As evidence of the government`s failure to create sound economic policies, those polled pointed out inconsistent labor-management relations, unbalanced policies that focused mainly on distribution while neglecting economic growth, and procrastination with regards to privatization. The policy failure was, they responded, attributable to poorly coordinated policy making among government agencies, non-experts` involvement in policy making, and lackluster responses to collective selfishness.

Only 6 people polled expected the nation`s economy to recover within the year, while 24 people expected the recovery to occur sometime after this year at the earliest.

In the meantime, the Federation of Korean Industries (FKI) conducted a survey of 126 entrepreneurs of large, small, and medium sized companies, who participated in its summer forum on Jeju Island. In the survey, 35.6% of those business leaders surveyed considered the biggest issue facing the Korean economy to be unstable relations between labor and management. The second biggest problem turned out to be collective selfishness and rising conflicts within Korean society (29.2%).

Pessimism over the national economy in the second half prevailed among business leaders, with 36.9% forecasting that economic conditions for business would hardly change and 35.2% expecting it to worsen.

As for the most urgent tasks for revitalizing corporate investment, the respondents answered stabilizing labor-management relations and establishing an advanced labor-management model based on laws and principles (36.0%), erasing uncertainties of the future through consistent policies (30.2%), and the easing and lifting of regulations on investment (10.3%).

Kwang-Hyun Kim Yeon-Su Shin kkh@donga.com ysshin@donga.com