In order to respond to the trend in fair trade and market liberalization for developed economies, Korea has recently pursued for import liberalization policy in earnest for the transition to open economy system. Since 1990, the Uruguay Round Agreement and Korea's OECD entry have accelerated market liberalization.
Korea maintained protective measures such as import quotas due to an adverse balance of international payments. However, since the IMF entry of 1998, Korea has tried to change a preliminary import management system to an advanced model post-import management system.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II outlines the definition, history and structure of safeguard system. Section III discusses the problem of law interpretation and application, examining the gray zone measures and recent status of Uruguay Round safeguard agreement. Section IV looks into safeguard system and measures of selected countries. Section V discusses the problem and ways for improvement of Korea's safeguard system, suggesting associated organizations, foreign trade law and flexible tariff system. Finally, several desirable strategies and policy implications or Korea's safeguard system are proposed in Section VI.