The Legacy of Deferred Compensation in Korea’s Administrative Reforms*

While New Public Management is becoming an established program for improving the quality of public administration, this study redirects our attention to the merits of an older system. Some of the public administration mechanisms that were reformed with the advent of democratization and globalization are argued in this study to have worked better than their newer versions. Using the Korean example, this study demonstrates that liberal political reforms may be harmful for public management, contrary to the usual expectations about their benefits. In the Korean bureaucracy, the disruption of deferred compensation— attractive post-retirement employment as a reward for policy performance during one’s tenure as a civil servant—impaired its organizational capacity, as policy autonomy dropped and corruption increased within the bureaucracy.