This book analyzes the salient features of the current Korean competition policy with an emphasis on chaebols, or big business groups, and makes suggestions to recast it from the perspective of informatization and globalization.

Chapter 1 reviews the path on which the Korean Fair Trade Act has progressed, highlighting its characteristics and logic. In so doing, the law's role of pursuing the ideal of competition in the grim reality of concentrated economic power is sketched. Its similarities to and differences from the Japanese Antimonopoly Act that served an important reference to the Korean Fair Trade Act, are delineated. At the same time, the recent chaebol policy is anatomized to reveal some of their logical deficiencies. It is stressed that the overall competition policy must be reformulated with a view to guiding the Korean firms in the changing topography of global competition. The recent legal trend in the United States is a good example. 

Chapter 2 addresses various issues of chaebol policy. First, it discusses the causes and consequences of chaebols and formulates the basic policy line. It then examines the economic rationale of the current policy on cross subsidization, corporate governance and the relationship between industrial and financial capital. For long, the argument on these issues have been charged with emotion. Now is the high time to approach these issues from the point of view of economic rationality and to unfold the relevant policy in a consistent manner. Also related policies in foreign countries must not be simply imitated without paying attention to the differences in their idiosyncratic historical, social and political factors.

Chapter 3 surveys how the Fair Trade Act has evolved in controlling various types of anticompetitive business integration and delves into the economic logic underlying regulatory statutes. Korea has recently amended relevant provisions reflecting the experience of past law enforcement and the new developments of the industrial organization theory. A comparative study is made on how the core concept of 'the substantial lessening of competition' is understood and applied in Korea and the United States, respectively. This chapter sheds light on such critical yet controversial issues as the line of commerce, market shares, the restraint of trade and the efficiency defence in the context of horizontal integration. Thereby, suggestions are offered to further improve Business Integration Guidelines.

Chapter 4 takes a bird's-eye-view on the trend of business integration in Korea and evaluates several important decisions of the Fair Trade Commission on mergers and acquisitions since 1999. The cases involving SK Telecom, Inchon Steel, Hyundai Motors, Gillette are scrutinized. This appraisal identifies problems in current enforcement of the Fair Trade Act and their remedial measures.

Chapter 5 deals with competitive effects of collaborations among competitors that has become widespread in the wave of technological innovation and economic globalization. Positive and negative economic effects of joint ventures, the most typical form of such cooperations, are clarified for the product market, the technology market as well as the innovation market. Antitrust Guidelines for Collaborations Among Competitors prepared by the United States antitrust authorities in 2000 are rephrased for an easy general understanding. Moreover, the effects of standardization that has become the focal point of competition in many high-tech industries are investigated and the corresponding policy is presented.

Finally, Chapter 6 sets the keynote of competition policy in Korea. In formulating and enacting the policy, firms must be recognized as organisms reacting to given conditions. Therefore, government must provide well-organized incentives to firms so that they are induced into the optimal trajectory for the whole economy. Firms, though independent legal entities, would better be allowed to pursue flexible alliances of strategies and resources with others. Ultimately, a new coalition among the government, firms and the society must be formed to cope with ever-intensifying global competition.