Why do you think it has not done more to reduce their power? South Korea tries to clip wings of the chaebol Many believe the conglomerates should be reined in but the government plans only to ease regulations that govern them and their tangled shareholding structures.

By Anna Field In the 1960s and 1970s, South Korea’s chaebol propelled the country’s explosive growth, helping to transform it from one of the world’s poorest countries into an Asian tiger. Now, South Korea is the world’s 10th largest economy yet the family-run conglomerates have become what some see as untameable beasts in need of reining in.

‘The chaebol have become too powerful,’ argues Kwon Oh-seung, the chairman of the Korean Fair Trade Commission and the anti-trust regulator leading the charge to stop what he sees as the conglomerates’ distortion of the Korean economy.

But rather than pursue a crackdown on the chaebol, South Korea’s government is pushing a plan to ease the regulations that govern the conglomerates and the often tangled shareholding structures via which their controlling shareholders control vast industrial empires, often with formal shareholdings of 5 per cent or less. The National Assembly is due this month to consider a change that would see the number of companies subject to cross-shareholding restrictions fall from 343 units of 24 chaebol to just 24 companies belonging to seven groups.