공기업의 투명성과 재정건전성에 대한 소고

Abstract

Public enterprises are established mainly for the purpose of providing for public goods, and thus it should be regarded as an extended part of government. The public sector is often operated inefficient, however, since market mechanisms or incentive schemes to reduce agency costs in private companies are not available in such public enterprises. In fact, however, the notion of “firm value” is still working to analyze the public enterprises, because they should be sustainable without financial assistance from the government. This paper starts with recent scandal of government debt increase, and explores several routes by which outside monitoring is enhanced and as a result public enterprises end up with being less leveraged. As far as transparency of management is concerned, three outside monitoring mechanisms are covered; external audit, public disclosure, and management evaluation. They are already institutionalized in Korea, but there are still many rooms to improve. Moreover, even if all the required information is timely and adequately disclosed, they are not as useful as the disclosure of private companies, since the object function of public enterprises is not necessarily to maximize the corporate value or short-term profits. In fact, however, the management are somewhat likely to feel pressure from the public disclosure of their financial situation, because they still need some level of profitability to be sustainable in the long run. In this regard, the profitability of public enterprises should be more emphasized. This paper also examines recent rapid increase of the government debt in public enterprise sector. The debt of non-financial public enterprises by the end of 2013 is 362.0 trillion Won in the central enterprises and is 50.9 trillion Won in local enterprises. Although the government seems to be optimistic in restricting financial structure of public enterprises, this paper points out that such high leverage is likely to result in social inefficiencies, which should be borne by future generation. The government is not obliged to pay the debts of public enterprises, but it is actually almost impossible to leave the public enterprises to go bankrupt. Thus, future government will allow financial support to them. Such social costs associated with government debt should be reduced. Several strategies are suggested. The scope of government debt, for instance, should be re-defined to include all the debt of public enterprises for which government is responsible.