How a Powerful Bureaucracy Fell: The Abolition of the Economic Planning Board in South Korea

This paper analyzes the politics of major state institutional reform by focusing on the abolition of the Economic Planning Board (EPB)in South Korea. The EPB, which had been the top coordination agency representing Korea’s high-development era since 1961, was abolished abruptly and swiftly in 1994. The sudden downfall of the EPB has been generally interpreted as the demise of an obsolete developmental bureaucracy facing the pressure of globalization. This paper, however, shows the discrepancy between such reform rationale and the actual institutional choice. The reformist president proactively reinterpreted globalization as an exogenous challenge that required state-centric comprehensive social reform and utilized the EPB abolition as effective shock therapy. While the president’s preference was decisive in the particular choice of reform agenda, the institutional legacy of the EPB considerably limited its maneuverability in reform policymaking. The process of the EPB abolition shows that state institutional reform cannot be understood simply as an apolitical and technical reaction to given problems, but should be approached as a highly political choice that can be far from the facade of reform rationale.