Outward Foreign Investment Policy in Korea

Korea made substantial efforts to integrate its economy with more globalized economies during the 1990s. For its future competitiveness, every sphere of the Korean national economy has witnessed major policy changes to integrate the domestic economy with the cross-bordering economy. The outward foreign investment policy, among all of the domestic economic policy changes, has undergone a key transformation to enable Korean firms to go abroad. This paper traces the origin and evolution of Korean outward foreign investment policies over the last four decades in response to the changes in the global economy. Moreover, this paper describes the transformation of the role of the Korean government in three different phases and identifies the recent issues in outward foreign investment in Korea.