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INTRODUCTION
The sinking of the Sewol ferry on 16 April 2014 claimed 304 lives, mostly high school students who were on a school excursion trip to a resort island of Jeju. The event raised serious questions about marine safety and the role of the state in Korea. It was clearly a man-made disaster. The capsizing of the passenger ship could have been avoided had the safety regulations been properly observed. The lives of many, if not all, of the passengers killed could have been saved had there been effective rescue operations. How could the vessel be allowed to sail with so many violations of the safety protocol, including cargo overloading, insufficient ballast water and risky modifications to the vessel? Why did the captain and crew of the Sewol escape and abandon the vessel when passengers were still aboard, and why was the Coast Guard so incapable and hesitant at the scene of drowning passengers trapped inside the sinking ship? What were the structural deficiencies that brought about negligence of such magnitude?
South Koreans were appalled and outraged by their government's gross failures in safety regulatory enforcement and rescue operations as well as the blind pursuit of profit by the Cheonghaejin Marine Co. Ltd., the owner of the Sewol ferry, at the expense of public safety. The tragedy led to a national soul-searching about its causes. Two major political economy explanations, in addition to cultural explanations, have been proposed: corruption and neoliberalism. While we do not discount the role of safety-insensitive culture in Korean society in the Sewol tragedy, our main concern is with questions of political economy.
The public blamed corruption for the safety regulatory failures (Hong 2014; Roh 2014). While there was evidence of pervasive collusion between the government regulators and the regulated business, little evidence was found for outright corruption. Close ties between government officials in charge of marine safety regulations and rescue operations and the passenger shipping industry soon became evident, as it was revealed that retired bureaucrats occupied the bulk of the top positions at the industry association and related private entities through "parachute appointments."1Terms such as Gwan-fia (bureaucratic mafia) and Hae-fia (sea mafia) were widely used...