• International Commerce and Information Review
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.53-74
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• 2017

There have been growing concerns that Korea's products keep losing their international competitiveness. It is necessary to restore strong muscles of manufacturing sectors. Together, efforts must be made to strengthen the competitiveness of service sector. While wide consensus has been reached on the necessity that Korea's service sector needs overhaul for stronger global competitiveness, it is rather difficult to witness any remarkable improvements. Insufficient performances might result from the protection of the captive markets by the interested parties. The research starts from the proposition that the introduction of MDP will bring down the barriers between the segmented services and promote competition. We provide theoretical analyses and report better performances of major countries which introduced MDP in their soils. Considering the reality, we propose that in the foreseeable future, a MDP in the areas of tax, law and accounting be introduced in Korea because these areas seem to create least conflicts of disciplinary duties due to public purposes. Broader MDPs in other areas may take some more time. There exist, however, some limitations. As MDP has not been officially introduced in Korea, it is almost impossible to directly compare the performances between the pre- and post-MDP in Korea. Data scarcity of business performances of companies also limits the study.