Suchergebnisse

In Korea, demands for economic and social democratization increasedafter 2000, as the country dealt with economic recession after the 1997 Asianfinancial crisis and with other problems resulting from mismanaged domesticpolicies. In response, the Korean state carried out unprecedented reform of thepublic sector to address these problems by streamlining state capacity. Theprimary objectives of this article are to understand Korean public sector reformtogether with its domestic political factors from a policy transfer perspective,and to suggest an alternate model for the reforms. The reforms, which took placeduring the Kim Dae-Jung and the Roh Mu-Hyun administrations, were consolidatedthrough proactive policy transfer by politico-bureaucratic decisions inorder to establish a new statecraft despite the global diffusion of policy trends.Investigation of its domestic political circumstances and historical contextreveals that the reforms were not direct emulations of global norms, but ratheran attempt to use a mixture of models to raise the quality of government.

Government reforms in South Korea, beginning in the 1980s, moved toward deconcentration and deregulation in the 1990s and 2000s. However, the contents of the reforms under the "transformational" presidencies following democratization, which aimed to raise the quality of government and respond to increasing social polarization and political discord, did not significantly reduce state power or depoliticize policy making. Instead, state strength was consolidated through tripartite politicization: the rise of ministers as a third force in policy making vis-à-vis the president and legislature. Under the "post-transformational" presidencies of Lee Myung-Bak and Park Geun-Hye, government reforms can be summarized as bipartite politicization between the president and legislature, as ministerial power has been reduced.

Despite vast natural resources and geographic advantages in the Asia-Pacific region, foreign direct investment (FDI) in the Philippines was ranked among the lowest in the region for the past 30 years. Some challenges, including high-level public corruption, low economic development and the government's inability to establish a good business environment, are seen to have reduced FDI. Moreover, the Philippines still remains lagging in the South East Asian region in terms of FDI despite recent developments, such as good GDP figures and the reforms put in place by President Benigno Simeon Aquino III. This may imply an interval between the reforms made and their impact on FDI. Thus, this study investigates the lagged effects of the government's anti-corruption stance, reforms undertaken to facilitate business and economic growth on FDI in the Philippines. In the process, it draws on both qualitative and quantitative data: The latter utilises an auto-regressive distributed lagged model to find possible time intervals on the impact of variables with each other, while the former provides support through a narration of historical developments, trends and explanations rooted on theoretical foundations.