시장구조와 경쟁효율-불완전경쟁에 따른 사회적 비용과 의의-

Market Structure and Social Efficiency

Concerns regarding corporate concentration have been a recurrent theme in Korean public policy since the Fair Trade Law was enacted in 1981. Corporate concentration embodies at least four distinct concept.aggregate concentration, conglomeration, ownership concentration, and market concentration. Among them market concentration and the resulting inefficiency in resource allocation has been the major concern of most mainstream economists The discussion in Korea, however, have tended to be misguided by focusing on equity and chaebol hegemony rather than efficiency arguments This might explain why the Korean public policy has given much more weight on restraing aggregate concentration and conglomeration of the 30 largest chaebols. As I have shown in another book, however, aggregate concentration is not a Korean-specific phenomenon. When the 30 chaebols are directly compared with the OECD countries' 30 largest firms, the employment-based aggregate concentration ratio remains relatively low in Korea ; i.e. Korea 18.5%, U.S.A. 22.9%, Germany 31.7%, and U.K., 32.6%. It should be also noted that if increases in aggregate concentration do not indicate increases in market concentration, then attention should not be paid to them. Moreover the public policy targeting the sizes of domestIc firms only will not fit the changing environment of global competition. All the above facts being taken into consideration, we need to move our concerns from aggregate concentration to market concentration. Under this background this book deals with the issues on market concentration. More specifically this book examines three important questions regarding the relation between market structure and social efficiency. First, how large social costs arise due to market power in the Korean manufacturing sector? Are they large enough for the government to intervene vIgorously in market mechanism? Previous literatures on this issue have concerned themselves with the costs of monopoly. But it is a well-known fact that monopoly is the exceptions rather than the rules For this reason the estimation here is based on the imperfect competition model in which monopoly becomes a special case. Second, what correlations exist there between the social costs and concentration indices such as Herfmdahl index and CR_k? These indices measure market structure-generally size distribution of firms at a point in time. While it has been recognized that measures of market structure provide only a proxy for the intensity of competition, they are often used by public policy economists in the formulation and the admmistration of competition policy. So by dealing with this second question this study tests the hypothesis that concentration indices are the reliable indicators of market power It should be noted that most literatures have tested the hypothesis only in a indirect way by looking at the relation between concentration indices and profit rates. Third, are concentration indices good substitutes for mobility mobility indices? The Austrian school holds that competition is best characterized as a process; in contrast, the structuralist school postulates that competition is a state of affairs. Mobility statistics are dIrect measure of the intensity of competition. They reflect the process that takes place within an industry as firms enter and exit, grow and decline. But concentration measures reflect the state of affairs and are indirect proxies of the same phenomenon. Because of the widely held beliefs among structuralist economists that concentration and mobility are closely related, however, previous literatures pay little attention to mobility statistics. By dealing with the third question, this study tests whether these beliefs are empirically valid. This study uses ...