[Editorial] The Nation’s Economy Should Plan for ‘New Blueprint’

In a speech during a ceremony marking the National Trade Day, President Roh Moo-hyun yesterday suggested many tasks for our economy: create an environment where companies can do business well through improved relationships between management and labors along with attenuated regulations, accelerate the policy of converting Korean plants’ transfer to overseas into domestic investments, attract more foreign investments, create more jobs, technology innovation, improve higher standard of major industries by taking in state-of-the-art technologies, develop next generation growth power industry, cultivate human resources…

However, the mission of the government is not just listing these “to-do items,” but finding out solutions and figuring out the given tasks swiftly and effectively through specific means. What counts the most is to provide an ideal environment that facilitates business and investments, and to set up the realistic condition where even foreigners will consider South Korea as favorable investment spots.

For this, we may as well start from the beginning by restructuring the government’s current economic management system and decision making procedures. And also in terms of manpower, the actual economic policy team members should be replaced by new brains. The newly created economic team will have to clearly set the priorities of national policies and focus accordingly on the capacity of the government. We should be as attentive as possible in order not to stick to a justification, which will disperse the power by creating barriers against our own policy of recovering the nation’s growth potentials.

Although there is a deputy prime minister and Finance-Economy minister, his leadership does not appear strong enough to control the entangled pending economic issues and therefore, each ministry is raising its voice and tackling each other in the end. The Blue House operates a three-way system for presidential aides related to economic affairs: the policy director, economic affairs advisor, and senior presidential secretary for policy planning. Due to this scattered system, economic divisions have to report to many supervisors and reconciliation among them doesn’t function well, which results in creating many tasks without giving any conclusion. There is no focus among these economic bodies and even the Blue House has to repeat readjustments within them, so it can be explained that the nation cannot but fail to deal with a rapid change in the economic environment and unexpected risky situations.

President Roh would rather review positively on renovating the Blue House’s current economic aide system and revive the senior ministry for economy. The deputy prime minister and Finance-Economy minister should compromise with the presidential advisor for Economic Affairs on handling major topics on economic operations, play a role for mutual assistance, and facilitate the process for policy control. Only if this happens will the pending issues be settled.

In particular, the deputy prime minister and Finance-Economy minister should possess a maximum authority in order to operate a stronger driving force and policy control ability. For this reason, the president will have to select a well-experienced and authoritative figure as the new deputy prime minister and Finance-Economy minister, who deserves to be the center of the nation’s economic brainpower but also be required to be a true “Responsible Minister for Economy.”