Reform in the contract state: Embedded directions in public procurement regulation in South Africa

As South Africa contemplates another episode of public procurement legal reform, we trace the post-apartheid history of such efforts and consider critical issues moving forward. South Africa has over the last few decades followed the international trend of an expanding ‘contract state’. Public procurement is increasingly important to state operational and allocative concerns. South Africa’s public procurement regime is progressively configured into a centrally steered but decentralised organisational form. Inflected through domestic public procurement politics, however, the development of this organisational form has been truncated, with the establishment of only limited central steering capacity producing a public procurement regulatory regime which is weak, fragmented and incoherent, contributing to problems of state incapacity and corruption. In 2013 South Africa’s Minister of Finance announced a major push to reform South Africa’s contract state. The effort aims to better establish, locate and extend public procurement regulatory authority. It has begun to elaborate a centre-led, strategic and increasingly developmental procurement methodology. It is moving towards more flexibility, effectively an attempt to reduce rigidity in rules while building more robust and distributed disciplinary mechanisms, ones which take account of deficits in regulatory capacity and political will. We consider the potentials and pitfalls of these movements and suggest ways to optimise them.     

Shift from Input‐based Growth to Productivity‐based Growth in Korean Manufacturing Industry

The Korean economy has entered a period of relatively sluggish growth after experiencing very dynamic and high economic growth since the 1970s. The recent growth rate has been around 3 percent, which is similar to that in many advanced countries. According to growth accounting, economic growth is possible because of input increases and productivity increases. Productivity growth is much more important than input increases for long‐term economic growth. We investigated whether there was a structural break in the Korean manufacturing industry and whether the main factor contributing to economic growth shifted from input to productivity. Using various econometric methods, we tested this question and found some interesting results. First, there was an important change in the 1990s, and the productivity trend seemed to show a big structural break at that time. Second, an input increase was the main factor contributing to economic growth before the break and productivity became more important after the break. Third, there was also a major change in the relationship between international trade and productivity.     

The political economy of income distribution in South Korea: The impact of the state's industrialization policies

A number of previous studies of economic growth and income distribution in South Korea, based largely on 1960s data, concluded that South Korea was an exception to Kuznets' ‘inverse U-pattern’ of income inequality. Also, it was regarded as an exception to the usual negative consequences predicted by dependency theory for an economy so dependent on foreign capital and world markets. This author presents more recent data — for the 1970s and early 1980s — in order to support his claim that the trend toward income equality that appeared in the 1960s was reversed in the 1970s. The author develops a thesis that stresses the role of the state in shaping the Korean political economy. He argues that it has been the strong South Korean developmentalist state in firm control of both domestic and foreign capital and its export-oriented industrialization policies that have been the principal determinant of the pattern of income distribution. He contests the usual explanation related to the level of economic development or external dependency per se.     

日韩贸易摩擦的原因、影响及趋势分析

日本对出口韩国的生产半导体零部件的3种核心原材料采取管制措施,其根本目的在于掌握半导体乃至高技术领域的主导权。出口管制实施后,部分日本企业试图通过拓展其他国家市场来弥补因对韩出口管制造成的损失,也有些企业计划在海外设厂以便避开政府管制向韩国供应原材料。出口管制还导致日本产品在韩遭到抵制、韩国赴日游客锐减等。韩国通过半导体核心部件国产化、进口来源地多元化等对策,在一定程度上减少了贸易制裁对半导体行业的负面影响,使日本被迫放宽出口管制。由于日韩处于半导体全球价值链分工不同环节中,存在紧密的"一荣俱荣,一损俱损"的依存关系,因此,日韩贸易摩擦的缓和存在内在必然性。另外,RCEP签署以及中日韩自贸区谈判等外部因素会进一步促进日韩贸易关系改善。     

国外政府绿色采购的经验借鉴

政府采购中实施绿色采购具有很强的杠杆作用,突出的资源环境问题已使得政府绿色采购受到各国的普遍重视。我国政府绿色采购实践中还存在一些问题,需借鉴国外政府绿色采购的成功经验,以建立和完善我国政府绿色采购制度。     

Information Technology, Organizational Transformation and Productivity Growth: An Examination of the Brynjolfsson–Hitt Proposition

This study investigates what happened to productivity growth during the Information Technology (IT) revolution in an IT-driven economy, Korea. To this end, we have decomposed the source of productivity growth into technological change, technical efficiency and scale economies using a stochastic frontier function and examined how the composition of productivity growth has changed with different phases of IT developments. We have used panel data that is comprised of 4022 firms from 1996 to 2000. We have found that Korean firms have been quick to embrace organizational restructuring to adapt to a new business environment brought about by IT, which seems to be the major source of the success of Korean firms. We have also found that: (i) there is no substantial difference in productivity gains between IT-producing firms and IT-using firms; (ii) productivity growth is more robust to business cycles in an IT-driven economy than in the traditional economy; and (iii) efficiency improvement attributed to organizational transformation plays a greater role in productivity growth as IT applications become more widespread.     

Localisation barriers to trade: The case of South Africa’s renewable energy independent power program

South Africa’s Renewable Energy Independent Power Projects Procurement Program (REIPPPP) has been hailed as one of the most successful programmes of its kind, contracting 92 renewable energy projects totalling 6 328 MW and US$20.5 billion since its inception in 2011. Despite this success, the programme’s use of non-price factors such as local jobs, local black ownership, local content, and local community ownership in bid evaluation has generated criticism and controversy. Lessons learned in other countries about how and when to use policies like import substitution to promote sustainable economic development seem not to have been fully incorporated by the REIPPPP. We therefore offer a cautionary note that dramatic and impressive localisation results are not inevitable – especially considering the size of the South African market and accompanying investment uncertainties – and that there is bound to be a trade-off between price and non-price factors in these kinds of competitive procurement programmes.     

Regulation and facilitation of public‐private partnerships: The MSP policy framework

This article describes the Municipal Services Partnership (MSP) Policy developed by the Department of Constitutional Development (DCD) of the Ministry for Provincial Affairs and Constitutional Development of South Africa to help local authorities respond to the great demand for improvement of municipal services. The MSP policy was developed by the DCD, utilising consultative policy making. It defines municipal services partnerships and typical contractual forms of MSPs, and also identifies gaps and constraints in existing South African law that can make implementation of MSPs unnecessarily difficult or more costly for local authorities and service consumers. The policy creates a framework for competitive procurement of MSP contracts and, finally, it describes the capacity needs of local authorities to deal effectively with MSP planning, procurement and implementation, and identifies new and expanded institutional roles at the local and national levels to support local authorities that wish to engage in MSPs     

Road construction and small enterprise development: The experience of the N4 Maputo corridor

The problems and support needs of small road contracting enterprises and of the prospects for entrepreneurship and enterprise growth in the South African road construction sector is the focus of this investigation. This study examines the building of the N4 toll road which is the anchor project for the Maputo Development Corridor. It draws on a wide range of source material, including existing secondary sources, primary project documentation relating to the N4 anchor project, a set of interviews with key individuals and business associations involved with implementation of the project, and a questionnaire survey that was administered to 30 emerging contractors that had successfully secured contracts for work on the Maputo Development Corridor. Overall, the article investigates the progress and workings of South Africa's targeted procurement approach towards stimulating small contractors in road construction.     

Effects of Knowledge Spillovers on Knowledge Production and Productivity Growth in Korean Manufacturing Firms

Using Korean firm‐level data, this paper studies the effects of knowledge spillovers on knowledge production and productivity growth. Data from 213 Korean firms for the years 1985 to 2007 are used, and the number of patent applications is used as a proxy variable for knowledge. The results show that all the growth rates of output, patents, and productivity are higher in high‐technology firms. Regression results show that the spillover effect on knowledge production and productivity growth is very significant, and that the spillover effect is larger in small firms than in large firms. Moreover, spillover effects on productivity growth are larger after 1995, when Korean intellectual property rights were strengthened. Our findings suggest that the effects of knowledge spillover on productivity are positively correlated with strong intellectual property rights.     

Effects of foreign and domestic economic policy uncertainty shocks on South Korea

This paper investigates the effects of foreign and domestic economic policy uncertainty shocks on South Korea via structural VARs. The results show that both foreign and domestic policy uncertainty shocks exert negative and significant impacts on South Korea. Foreign economic policy uncertainty shocks are found to be more dominant than domestic economic policy uncertainty shocks in influencing the Korean output. The results also indicate that economic policy uncertainty that originates from foreign countries is a significant source of disturbance to the Korean economy, but domestic policy uncertainty plays a rather limited role in explaining Korean business fluctuations.     

COLONIALISM AND INDUSTRIALISATION: FACTORY LABOUR PRODUCTIVITY OF COLONIAL KOREA, 1913–37

Unlike other colonial economies, Korea industrialised rapidly during its colonial period, which past scholars attributed to the industrialisation policy directed by the Japanese colonial government between 1930 and 1945. Our analysis of factory labour productivity from 1913 to 1937 suggests significant revisions to this claim. Factory labour productivity as well as total production grew rapidly before the active intervention of the colonial government. In addition, Korean entrepreneurs invested heavily in their firms and successfully competed with Japanese entrepreneurs. We conjecture that the pre-war experience of Korean entrepreneurs provided a critical foundation for the post-colonial economic growth.     

The determinants of location choice of South Korean FDI in China

By using extensive and unique firm-level data for South Korean foreign affiliates in China, we investigated the determinants of location choice for South Korean multinational companies. South Korean companies are unevenly distributed inside China with more than 60 percent of their affiliates being located in the three northeast regions. Using conditional logit estimation, we found that market size and government policies approximated by economic zones, quality of labor, and transport infrastructure play a positive role in deciding location. On the other hand, labor costs, inner waterways, and distance show negative and significant coefficients. Finally, the model specification is shown to be robust to possible violation of the assumption of identical independent error terms. Some of the estimation results stand in contrast to those of other studies on the determinants of FDI stock flows from the world or Japan.     

The great divergence on the Korean peninsula (1910–2020)

Before the 1960s, North Korea's GDP per capita was 30%–50% higher than South Korea's due to industrialisation during the 1930s. However, the governments of the two Koreas pursued different goals in the 1960s, which resulted in a reversal. The South Korean government made economic growth its ultimate goal. They did this by self-implementing, adjusting and instituting an export-oriented development strategy. On the other hand, the North Korean government tried to maximise its ability to survive by sacrificing gains from economies of scale. These differences brought about remarkable differences in economic performance. The gap between the two economies has continued to grow since the income level reversal in the 1970s.     

Outsourcing and productivity: Evidence from Korean data

This paper aims to provide the first investigation of the productivity effect of outsourcing by using the Korean industry data at the three-digit ISIC level. We find that there are positive productivity gains from material outsourcing. The impact of material outsourcing increases when we account for the share of imports from China. This is due to the growth of Chinese exports to Korea over the recent years. Moreover, the results also suggest that during our sample period Korea's experiment with service outsourcing did not lead to an increase in its productivity.     

High productivity before or after exports? An empirical analysis of Korean manufacturing firms

This study investigates whether exporting is a cause or an effect of high productivity of firms’ in the Korean manufacturing industries. For this purpose, a panel database is assembled with 1335 firms from eight Korean manufacturing industries during 1997–2003. Evidence that high productivity causes exporting, referred to as self-selection, is found in three out of eight industries. However, we do not find support for the hypothesis that high productivity is affected by exporting, except in one industry. Sunk-cost or previous-export-experience effect on the current export status is statistically significant and robust across industries unlike that of firms’ productivity and size.     

完善我国律师刑事辩护制度的若干思考

律师刑事辩护制度是刑事司法制度的重要组成部分，它对保护犯罪嫌疑人、被告人的合法权益和保障刑事司法公正起着十分重要的作用。本文在分析我国律师刑事辩护制度现状的基础上，针对律师的会见权、阅卷权、调查取证权以及刑事辩护豁免权提出了相应的完善措施。     

National and provincial PPPs: Issues of supervision and accountability

This article focuses on the key requirements for an enabling framework for the implementation of public‐private partnerships (PPPs) in South Africa. It contends that such an enabling framework should facilitate coherent government policies and legislation, secure procurement reform, enhance capacity, foster stringent ‐ albeit not constraining ‐financial regulation and put in place supportive institutional arrangements. Arguing that PPPs revolve around risk sharing between the public and private sector, value for money and affordability, key features of the South African policy environment as it affects PPPs are discussed. Amid considerable progress, policies across sectors could still be better aligned, legislative inconsistencies straightened out, procurement procedures and approaches updated to focus more sharply on value for money (rather than lowest price) and financial uncertainties countered. It is also noted that PPPs currently occur in an institutional vacuum in the public sector. It is therefore proposed that a dedicated institutional capacity be created to support PPPs more effectively.     

US Foreign policy in the war against terrorism: Challenges,prospects, and ROK's desirable options

Despite the September 11 incident, the US should consider investing more resources in Northeast Asia and Europe rather than focusing all its energy on the terrorists. While consolidating its existing grand strategy of promoting democracy and the market economy, the US may need to draw more support from its major allies to be better prepared against the multi‐spectrum conflicts. As for South Korean options, it is desirable to level up its support for America's war in Afghanistan and also for the long‐term fight against terrorism. In addition, the ROK‐US readiness against potential North Korean terrorism and asymmetric threat should be improved through closer bilateral consultation and coordination.     

电子采购技术与政府采购行为的互动障碍及对策

世界贸易组织对各国政府采购过程中的电子采购技术使用做出明确规定,而我国的电子采购技术使用尚处于初级阶段,如何推动电子采购技术和政府采购行为互动就成为我国政府采购发展过程中的重要课题.文章结合现阶段电子采购技术发展中遇到的问题,分析了电子采购技术和政府采购行为的互动障碍,阐释了电子采购技术和政府采购行为在个体、政府内部、跨部门层面的互动作用,为我国未来的电子化政府采购发展提供了相应对策.