A colleague of mine asked me a few days ago to find a document showing Korea’s level of transparency in terms of legal procedures of unfair dismissal disputes.
My online search was not successful due to lack of English contents on labor issues. However, in the course of doing the research, I came across an interesting report released by the World Bank named “Doing business in Korea”.
The report had several indicators related to the ease of doing business. What caught my attention was the indicator “Enforcing contracts”. The indicator is about procedures, time and cost to resolve a commercial dispute.
Although the indicator is not 100% relevant to dismissal dispute procedures, I thought it might be something of slight reference.
The ranking of countries based on the “enforcing contracts” indicator as shown below was somewhat surprising to me.
| Hong Kong, China | 1 |
| Luxembourg | 2 |
| Iceland | 3 |
| Latvia | 4 |
| Finland | 5 |
| United States | 6 |
| Norway | 7 |
| Korea | 8 |
| Germany | 9 |
| France | 10 |
| New Zealand | 11 |
| Hungary | 12 |
| Austria | 13 |
| Singapore | 14 |
| Belarus | 14 |
| Lithuania | 16 |
| Moldova | 17 |
| China | 18 |
| Russian Federation | 18 |
| Australia | 20 |
| Japan | 21 |
| Belgium | 22 |
| Tajikistan | 23 |
| United Kingdom | 24 |
Korea better than Singapore and Japan in terms of time and cost for commercial dispute resolution? Maybe what I read and heard from HR managers of foreign companies about slow and inefficient legal systems of Korea only applies to labor-related disputes.
What confirmed my guess was the indicator “employing workers”. The indicator turned out to be not only about hiring but also relates to difficulty of firing and firing cost. On this indicator, Korea ranked 152 among 181 countries.
If you’re interested in the above rankings and more, check here.