[Editorial] Looking for another Kim Jae-Ik

The economic situation is going from bad to worse, and so the people's agony is deepening. Because the government's policies aimed at addressing the nation's plight are haplessly ineffective, complaints from economic institutions are growing.

At this juncture, the government has accepted most of the demands from the trade unions of these institutions and thus virtually knuckled under to their threats of general strikes. Consequently, the general public has been frustrated at the crushing of their aspirations for economic recovery on the basis of structural reforms in the financial sector. Since the government agreed with the trade unions to guarantee the independent management of banks until June, 2002 and to reduce their manpower through self-determined steps, it virtually put an end to the financial restructuring.

The government cannot in any way justify its decision to continue to waste taxpayers' money by injecting it into insolvent banks for the next two years. The Financial Supervisory Commission ruled out such a possibility, yet there is ample room for doubting the government's determination, not to mention a wide gap in interpretations of the accords between the government and the unions.

In view of President Kim Dae-Jung's economic policies, the administration was destined to be rendered helpless and the economy plunged into chaos. During the regime of president Chun Doo-Hwan, economic matters were managed by Kim Jae-Ik, his senior secretary for economic affairs, and Chun even went so far as to say he wasn't concerned with economic issues. Chun's work was to encourage and defend his economic team as they carried out the job of supporting economic expansion. Kim pursued policies that fell in line with market principles and spearheaded massive investments in the future. As a result, Korea could overcome the oil shock at that time and pave the way for further economic prosperity, despite the argument over the legitimacy of Chun's (military) government.

This does not mean to compare the military regime during the developing economic era with the incumbent government. But unlike the time when the people entertained strong anti-government feelings, they are very cooperative with the Kim government, as exemplified by ordinary citizens' voluntary donations of gold rings and other valuables to help the government ride out the economic crisis in late 1997.

Nevertheless, things went wrong in the course of implementing economic policies, when President Kim came to the forefront of the policy enforcement effort. The fact that the President led the policy implementation is not a thing to be criticized, but he would have been better advised just to set a major policy direction, while leaving concrete policy matters to the experts on his economic team. Had he done so, the situation would not be so dire.

If the economic team loses power and is trying to read the mind of the President, the market will not rely on the team members and therefore the President will be required to cope with all economic entities himself. In this situation, there is little room for the emergence of a person like Kim Jae-Ik. From now on, President Kim would do well to change his policy and cultivate a system under which another Kim Jae-Ik can emerge.