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Regulatory authority officials in Korea have been considerably strong enough to affect citizen’s intentions and alter their incentives to take new challenges. But, from the result of steady regulation reform, absurd bureaucratic interventions have been sharply reduced. Corruption in the process of rent seeking has decreased too. It is impossible to exercise regulatory authority that infringes on the essence of the freedom of the people because people who live in a democratic society would not accept these absurd practices.

This chapter introduces some key features of the regulatory management system in South Korea as well as the challenges that need to be overcome. In particular, the bureaucracy has worked hard to chip away at past regulations that produce rents for various private interest groups but provide little to society at large. Regulatory quality is tied closely to democracy as maintaining a fair and even playing field for entrepreneurs is a key freedom. Introducing checks and balances into the regulatory system can be an important way to facilitate this goal. The Regulatory Reform Committee (RRC) facilitated to strengthen the logic of regulatory necessity and the logic of improving regulation which increased the level of its institutionalization.

The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of the joint determination of bureaucratic corruption and economic development.

The analysis is based on a simple model of growth in which bureaucrats are employed as agents of the government to collect taxes from households.

Corruption is reflected in bribery and tax evasion as bureaucrats conspire with households in providing false information to the government. Costly concealment of this activity leads to a loss of resources available for productive investments. The incentive for a bureaucrat to accept a bribe depends on economy‐wide outcomes, which, in turn, depend on the number of other bureaucrats who accept bribes. The paper establishes the existence of multiple development regimes, together with the possibility of both history‐ and frequency‐dependent equilibria. The predictions of the analysis accord strongly with recent empirical evidence.

The paper provides insights into the issue, and in doing so, makes further inroads to the macroeconomics of misgovernance.

Despite an intensified anti-corruption campaign, China's economic growth and social transition continue to breed loopholes and opportunities for big corruption, leading to a money-oriented mentality and the collapse of ethical standards, and exposing the communist regime to greater risk of losing moral credibility and political trust. In Hong Kong, the setting up of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) in 1974 marked the advent of a new comprehensive strategy to eradicate corruption and to rebuild trust in government. The ICAC was not just an anti-corruption enforcement agency per se, but an institution spearheading and representing integrity and governance transformation. This chapter considers how mainland China can learn from Hong Kong's experience and use the fight against corruption as a major political strategy to win the hearts and minds of the population and reform governance in the absence of more fundamental constitutional reforms, in a situation similar to Hong Kong's colonial administration of the 1970s–1980s deploying administrative means to minimize a political crisis.

This paper aims to focus on understanding and preventing corruption in procurement in public sector settings. Just as not all corruption is the same, not all procurement is the same. One purpose is to analyze different types of procurements: standard, customized, intangible and complex. Corruption in procurement undermines public administration, and the purpose of this paper is to identify different types of procurements and provide readers with a framework for analysis and subsequent intervention.

In all, 42 actual cases of public sector corruption in procurement are examined, and from these, an analytical matrix is developed. These cases are derived from the reports of the New South Wales (Australia) Independent Commission against Corruption. These cases represent all of the procurement cases that the ICAC has taken to a formal hearing in its 30 years of existence.

While fraud is a major feature of corruption in procurement, there are significant organizational facilitators, and a number of slippage points in organizations are identified. These include peer culture, lack of due process, temptation and managerial incompetence/willful disregard, and these are built into a matrix which can be used in different countries or settings by readers wishing to understand and prevent different types of corruption in procurement in their agencies.

This paper uses cases that have not previously been aggregated or analyzed and provides analytical tools for practitioners and academics.

In the wake of public service liberalisation in many OECD countries, economic interventions into the purpose and implementation of social policies have gained a lot of interest in recent years. The prime aim of this paper is to describe the nature of these interventions. The paper examines the reasons for pursuing elusive efficiency objectives in the conduct of public policy, rationales for purchaser‐provider splits, evaluation of cost‐quality relationships, service costing and pricing, and the influence of “external” economic variables.

The paper breaks the analysis of public policy down to three layers of economic interventions: macroeconomics (allocative efficiency, intervention rationales and macroeconomic environment), mesoeconomics (economics of delivery in “social industries”) and microeconomics (agent behaviour, contracting, pricing and evaluation). Each level of economic intervention is illustrated with examples, mainly taken from Australian public policy and mainstream social economic research.

Some of the most critical questions in policy implementation (outsourcing, pricing, contracting and agency problems) can be traced back to economic reforms. Experiments with new modes of service delivery are driven by a changing economic context, yet the efficiency gains from these innovative approaches may come at the expense of service quality.

Changing macro‐, meso‐ and microeconomic variables profoundly alter the parameters of service delivery. Designers and managers of service delivery systems need to be aware of – and skilled in – the practical application of economic principles, concepts and methods.

Except for the health sector, there is a lack of consistent research on the interrelationships between the standard economics toolkit and the delivery of public services. Yet the two are profoundly intertwined. The paper helps distinguish these relationships by putting together elements of conceptual analysis and fieldwork.

This paper aims to explore empirically the emergence of entrepreneurs in China’s transition context since the 1980s.

This paper applies the China Private Enterprises Survey Database and historical evidence and Chi-Square test to identify the emergence patterns of China’s entrepreneurs in different historical stages.

This longitudinal study finds that factors such as working experience, education background and social connection had strong influences on entrepreneurship, but the impact of these have varied significantly along with institutional changes over the past three decades. It also identifies that the majority of emergent entrepreneurs were formerly low-level public servants and high-qualified managers in state-owned enterprises. Additionally, significant trends including an increasing number of female entrepreneurs, a decreasing impact from political networks, improving investment in innovation and diversifying financial sources are also found.

This paper is the first to apply the Chinese Private Enterprises Survey database to investigate the emergence patterns of China’s entrepreneurs in different historical stages after the 1978 reform.

Mises (1949[1963], p. 692) explains that market-failure justifications for state actions, such as economic regulation “ascribe to the state not only the best intentions but also omniscience.” He then points out that neither assumption is valid: government is not benevolent since both, those who are employed by the state and those who demand state actions, have subjective self-interests, and it is not all knowing since knowledge is widely dispersed and the cost of coordination is infinitely high, particularly without market profits and prices as coordinating mechanisms. Furthermore, Mises suggests that dropping either assumption undermines the conclusions that state intervention is necessarily desirable even if some sort of market failure is actually identified. Austrian economists in the Mises tradition have tended to focus on the knowledge problem in their challenges to regulation, however. Many Austrians obviously recognize the interest problem, of course, but they often assume it away in order to illustrate that government interference with markets is not desirable even if it is well intended. In contrast, public-choice analysis tends to focus on the interest problem as source of government failure, although some public-choice analysts also obviously recognize the knowledge problem. Indeed, this difference in perspective is so pronounced that Ikeda (1997, p. 240) explicitly distinguishes between Public Choice and Austrian political economy by suggesting that the Austrian approach assumes benevolence on the part of government officials, while the public-choice approach assume narrow interests.¹ Ikeda (1997, p. 150) also suggests that the separation of these two approaches is justified because “Austrian political economy and public choice are each capable of standing on their own [so] public-theorists…find it optimal simply to continue to pursue their research along the line of either the former or the latter approaches.” The following presentation questions this assertion. Instead, both assumptions should be dropped, and the resulting integrated Austrian-public-choice model should be expanded to include assumptions about the relationships between regulations, property rights security, and both market and political behavior.²

This book is a policy proposal aimed at the democratic left. It is concerned with gradual but radical reform of the socio‐economic system. An integrated policy of industrial and economic democracy, which centres around the establishment of a new sector of employee‐controlled enterprises, is presented. The proposal would retain the mix‐ed economy, but transform it into a much better “mixture”, with increased employee‐power in all sectors. While there is much of enduring value in our liberal western way of life, gross inequalities of wealth and power persist in our society.

Researchers of legislative behavior have attempted to explain the decisions of legislators for some time. Public choice scholars have argued that legislators will “sell” political favors in exchange for some from of interest group payment that is thought to benefit the legislator's electoral ambitions. Yet, legislators do not appear to receive the full value of their political favor in these exchanges. That is, the value of the policies offered appears to exceed the price paid by interest groups in the form of campaign contributions, speaking honoraria and other material payments. This imbalance has led some scholars to discount theories that explain legislative behavior motivated by material gain. However, to the extent that legislators value post‐elective employment opportunities, interest groups have an incentive to use the offer of future employment as a payment for present legislative influence. In this sense, perhaps a large portion of the difference in payments can be accounted for in the post‐elective employment careers of elected politicians. In this paper, I explore and explain this theory using a political market model and attempt to identify several attributes that I believe will be common among “prospect‐legislators” whose behavior is principally motivated by concerns with post‐elective life.