Since the global circumstance of manufacturing industry has been changed, moving into materials and components industry(-oriented) by increasing research and development investment, Korean government has been making efforts to enhance material and components industry since 2001, ranging from financial subsidy of 2.56 billion to blueprint and annual action plan, and special law. However, Korean M&C industry still shows its limitation for securing global competitiveness due to lack of core original technology, especially in materials industry. And it also fails to make breakthrough for getting out of nutcracker situation between the fastest emerging china and Japan armed with cutting edge technology .

This report focuses on what are the obstacles and alternatives to make ongoing government program for enhancing M&C industry in a more effective and efficient manner. As the result of program evaluation, several problems are pointed out. First, planning-appraisal-management activities for R&D are not well organized. Moreover, R&D programs are spread and overlapped across many government departments. In addition, poor after-sales service provided by Korean enterprises makes foreign buyers reluctant to choose Korean products in the first place. The last problem is that master plan and committee for M&C industry are not working enough to derive coordinative and harmonized work process.

Policy recommendations for these problems are as follow: First of all, complicated and diverse R&D management agencies should be merged and reorganized. Second, new comprehensive national plan for material related R&D programs is necessary to be devised. Third, local after-sales service needs to be beefed up overseas M&C market. Last but not least, the special law should be revised to provide a binding guideline for policy implementation.