Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Policy in Korea, 2013

Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Policy Review (EEPR), 1(1) · January 2014

This report reviews the entrepreneurial ecosystem policy that the Government of the Republic of Korea set out from January to December 2013 in six domains — regulation and law, finance, culture, support, human capital and markets — and analyses it in its context, against theory and in practice. The government represented the problem as a blocked “virtuous circle” of start-up finance and promised investment instead of loans. Its designs, however, placed public money and guarantees at the centre and left the principal tax incentives, for angel investment and technology M&A, to pending legislation. Relief from failure was reserved for “honest failure”, and the other domains received many small programmes, reported as outputs rather than effects. Its best measures lowered the cost of failure, as the abolition of joint guarantees in non-bank lending did, or let private investors choose the firms that public money followed.