反국가안보 외국인 투자규제법의 도입 이유

In 1997, Korea faced a financial crisis. Almost all defense devises for protecting the management were deprived of from Korea enterprises saying that those were obstacles to foreign investment in Korea. The most important national agent at that time was to induce the foreign investment. And now, Korea became the easiest country where they merge and/or acquisite the company either friendly or hostilly. No one argues that the foreign investment is important for the national economy. However, it is arguable whether we must allow all kinds of investments in any situation or we must limit the foreign investments under some circumstances. Recently, we have seen an argument that there must be a regulation even by the ones who has been very supportive to foreign investments. Furthermore, there newly started a National Committee for Protecting Basic Industries which consists of Federation of Korean Industries, Korean Unions, etc., and it publicly announced that there must be a law regulating foreign investment for security reasons. This was heavily cited by the presses. There are several bills at the Korean National Assembly. Those bills are in common that there must be a committee where it reviews the foreing investment whether it would negatively affects the national security in Korea. The reason that they call this bills as “Korean Exon-Florio Act” is it was made after the Exon-Florio Act in U.S. However, there have been serious debates over these bills. This paper reviews major reasons for opposing those bills and critically analyzed whether those arguments are persuasive enough. By way of analyzing those arguments, this paper showed why we must enact the law regulating foreign investment in Korea for security reasons.