자본주의의 변천과 주식회사 이사의 보수

Executive compensation has been much discussed in academic circle in Korea and the fights over executives' pay is now undergoing. However,nobody has raised the fundamental questions, the reason why to limit executive compensation, how could the executive compensation of the modern corporation be controlled and who would decide the reasonable compensation? This article overlooked the relations between changes in capitalism and the executive compensation. The capitalism has changed from “owner capitalism” to “managerial capitalism”, and then to “shareholder capitalism” and to “stakeholder capitalism”, and at last to “customer capitalism” in recent years. This article not only draws a contrast between the wide-ranging battles of the 1930s and today's more narrow debates on the executive compensation, but also discusses the current situation in Korea. Most important measures to curb pay are providing in relevant Act new requirements for pay disclosure. In the United States 5 highest compensations including CEO and CFO are subject to disclosure. Still other measures, referred to as “say on pay,” would require that shareholders be permitted to offer at least an advisory opinion on the propriety of compensation packages offered to company management. While these opinions would not be binding, compensation committees could ignore them at their peril. This writer concludes that executive compensation is not an urgent issue to manage in Korea, because executives in Korea usually compensated not so much in compare to executive compensations in other countries. Differences in compensation between executives and employees in Korea also are not so sharp (executive average compensation is 7.5 times higher than that of employee) as that of other countries (475 times higher in United States).