Seo Seok-joon

Seo Seok-joon (Korean: 서석준; 24 September 1938 – 9 October 1983) was a South Korean bureaucrat and administrator. He became a section chief at the Economic Planning Board in March 1962, served as vice minister of the Economic Planning Board and minister of Commerce and Industry in 1980, and died in the Rangoon bombing in 1983.

Life

Seo was born in Seongju County, North Gyeongsang Province. While in the second year at Seongju High School, he passed the qualification examination and entered the Department of Diplomacy at Seoul National University, graduating in 1960. From 1964, he received an AID scholarship for two years and studied economics in the graduate school of Vanderbilt University. In 1959, the year before he graduated from university, he passed the higher civil service examination in the administrative track, and in March 1962 he began his career as a section chief at the Economic Planning Board, embarking on a path as an economic bureaucrat.

While working mainly at the Economic Planning Board, he held a series of important posts: head of the Price Policy Division in 1967, director-general of the Price Policy Bureau in 1969, director-general of the Economic Planning Bureau in 1973, deputy vice minister in 1974, and vice minister in 1977 (and again in 1980). In doing so, he laid the groundwork for price policy. He boldly moved away from the price policy of stabilizing prices by targeting individual items and introduced a rational price policy that aimed to stabilize prices through comprehensive measures for balancing supply and demand. Besides these, he served as deputy head of the planning unit of the Heavy and Chemical Industry Promotion Committee in 1973, first senior secretary for economic affairs to the Blue House, and in December 1979 as head of the Administrative Coordination Office of the Prime Minister's Office. After serving as vice minister of the Economic Planning Board in May 1980, he was minister of Commerce and Industry from 1980 to 1982, and in 1982 he served as an advisory member of the Korea Development Institute. While minister of Commerce and Industry, he completed the adjustment of investment in the heavy and chemical industries and also achieved exports of 20 billion US dollars.

In 1983, he briefly went to the East-West Center at the , and was then appointed deputy prime minister concurrently minister of the Economic Planning Board, becoming the youngest deputy prime minister at the age of 45. Three months after taking office, in October 1983, he accompanied President on a six-country tour of and the lasting 17 days and 18 nights. On 9 October, at the Martyrs' Mausoleum (Aung San Mausoleum) in , the capital of , a bomb planted by a North Korean agent , and he died a martyr.