한국 공유자본주의의 성공조건: 국제 비교

Abstract

This paper studies how to utilize shared capitalism(SH) such as profit sharing, gain sharing and stock sharing in Korea which has been faced with the stagnation of economic growth as well as workers’ earning. It compares the features and prevailance of SH in US and EU especially focusing on UK and France with those of Korea. These countries had experienced the limit of capital and labor-led growth and then has transformed toward technology-driven growth which requires innovations of both organization and human capital. These innovations have been facilitated by the adoption of SH. The governments of those countries have strongly supported SH with litigations as well as tax incentives making SH rapidly widespread since late 1990s. SH has became established across all industries even though the differences of prevailance have existed by the form of SH and the characteristics of labor. Profit sharing is found to be most popular, gain sharing commonly utilized even in nonprofit sector and stock sharing popularly adopted in high-tech industries. SH has been found to contribute both workers’ welfare and firms’ performance with high performance work practices and employees’ representation practices. Korea has introduced SH with performance sharing plan and employee stock ownership plan but their utilization has been low. The performance sharing plan, which is mixed with both profit sharing and gain sharing, has been emphasized to easing unstable labor-management relations in early 1990s with tax incentive for firms introducing the plan. The employee stock ownership plan had been introduced to foster capital market and employees’ welfare in late 1960s providing privileged right to purchase the company's stock and then it has been modified to focus on employees’ wealth formation with providing tax incentive for both company’s contribution and employees’ return. The effect of the performance sharing plan on both firm’s performance and employees’ benefit has been found to be low and that of the employee stock ownership plan to be insignificant. This paper finds Korea to have big possibility to develop SH since it has highly educated workers abundantly while firms’ need to motivate employees as human assets for innovation is enormous and the government is obliged to make SMEs(small and medium enterprises) and service industries competitive to sustain growth. It suggests the reform of Korea SH institutions and practices as well as that of tax incentive system to catch the rising social demand of SH. Korea needs to divide the current performance sharing plan into profit sharing and gain sharing and at the same time raise connectedness among stock sharing, profit sharing and gain sharing plans. It emphasizes the utilization of profit sharing plan with tax incentive for workers and encourages the government sector to adopt gain sharing plan. It is important to raise the role of SH related tax incentive system making it comply with the principles of SH. In order to raise SME’s utilization of SH, the government financial aid policy needs to be strategically upgraded by including its adoption of SH as an evaluating factor for financial aid. The government needs to make SH develop systematically by promoting the introduction of high performance work practices at firm level and supporting surveys and researches on the prevailance of SH at national level.