Korean regulatory reform began with the Kim Youngsam Administration. At the end of his term, the framework Act on Administrative Regulation was established. Based upon this Act, the Kim Daejung Administration established the Regulatory Reform Committee. At the time, Korea was experiencing serious economic crisis, and the widespread reform of markets, government and social systems to overcome this crisis became urgent. A major axis among several reform measures was this regulatory reform.

Regulatory reform means the annulment or the improvement of existing regulations in the initial stages. After this procedure is successfully advanced, regulatory quality control is the next step. Finally, regulatory management systems are to be established to make the governments regulation effective, efficient, clear and easily understandable. It might be said that Korea is currently at the third stage of regulatory reform.

Korean regulatory reform since 1993 has achieved many goals, at least nominally. However, the market participants including Korean business and economic experts have criticized the reform as not enough and not effective to reinforce economic vitality and the market competitiveness of Korean firms. This kind of criticism seems to arise from the following factors: first, it is biased to the number of improved or abolished regulations; second, it did not seriously consider the cost and benefit of regulatory reform; third, it did not focus on the most important fields or businesses etc.

This report identifies the fields and businesses that require more attentive reform efforts, if the reform is to be more successful and more effective. Thus it is related to the second and third reasons for criticism and it is hoped that further light will be shed regarding those causes. For this purpose, we analyze the results of Korean regulatory reform from 1998 to 2001.

In the second chapter, we find that: first, Korean regulation is concentrated to economic regulation; second, social regulation is not incentive-compatible and has been largely inefficient in spite of reform. In addition, economic regulation is still biased to price and entry regulations, which are should be abolished, and almost ninety per cent of social regulation has been concentrated to input standard regulation, which has been criticized as an inefficient tool. Even newly introduced regulations have retained the same problems as in the past. Therefore, Korean regulatory system should improve the regulatory impact analysis more scientific and efficient and efficient. It also needs to establish more compliance-oriented regulatory mechanism.

In the third chapter, we propose a Korean regulatory map. By a regulatory map, we mean a detailed description of regulations on industries and economic activities in businesses. Because this should describe the whole picture of government regulations on specific activities in the specific businesses, it must be helpful when designing effective and efficient regulatory management system. As a base of this regulatory map, we briefly outline the map by comparing the number of business-related registered regulations before regulatory reform and after the reform. According to our analysis, the 10 industries including air transportation were still over-regulated. It also shows that the 25 economic activities, including entry and exit, maintenance, pricing, and production and marketing etc. in these 10 industries require more attentive reform effort.