South Korea's efforts for structural changes in corporate governance of large Korean business groups after the Asian financial crisis

Abstract

This study introduces the characteristics of large Korean business groups (chaebols) and reviews various efforts toward structural changes in South Korea to improve the accounting system and corporate governance in the post Asian financial crisis period. Using descriptive trend analysis, this study also examines the consequences of the structural changes. Our findings show that major important financial indicators of the Korean economy have improved, implying that Korea's efforts seem to be somewhat successful. However, some sophisticated indicators, such as the magnitude of ownership discrepancy between cash flow rights and voting rights and the level of discretionary accruals, are shown to be rather deteriorated, indicating that the efforts toward structural changes have not fully resolved the fundamental problems prevalent in large Korean business groups