Personnel is policy (implementation): Bureaucrats and the Korean export miracle

Philipp Barteska and Jay Euijung Lee

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: How much does the effect of industrial policy depend on the capacity of the bureaucrats implementing it? We exploit the rotation schedule of managers of South Korea's export promotion offices in 87 countries between 1965 and 2000 to show that a one standard deviation increase in bureaucrat ability boosts exports by 37%, while the policy increases exports by 38% on average. Together, this implies the export promotion policy has no effect when implemented by a bureaucrat one standard deviation below average. Under higher-ability bureaucrats, South Korean exports respond more strongly to a country's import demand, suggesting a more effective transmission of market information. We find that performance in the first appointment predicts whether a bureaucrat sees subsequent appointments, highlighting performance-based screening of bureaucrats as a mechanism that increases the policy's effect.

Keywords: industrial policy; bureaucracy; economic development; export promotion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-05-06
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp2099.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp2099

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().