South Korea’s Response to Global Convergence in Criminal Antitrust Enforcement: Implications and Lessons

This paper examines South Korea’s evolving criminal antitrust enforcement regime, exploring how the country responds to global convergence trends while reflecting its unique political and economic context. Initially shaped by Japan’s developmental state model, South Korea’s competition law prioritized government control over market actors, resulting in extensive criminal antitrust enforcement. Despite global trends toward minimizing criminal sanctions, South Korea maintains a broader scope of criminal enforcement, even with several reforms of the law. However, by analyzing South Korea’s trajectory, this paper argues that the country has adopted the global standard in its own way. In fact, the criminal sanctions have been gradually removed and rarely invoked in practice. The findings of this paper emphasize that the global convergence should not be understood as a fixed outcome but as a dynamic evolving process. Convergence, therefore, does not imply uniformity. For emerging economies or countries in the process of developing competition regimes, South Korea’s path shows the importance of adjusting to global liberalization pressures while aligning with the country’s existing institutional features.