Economic Development In South Korea Research Articles

A Study on Limits to Promoting SMEs Networking Policies for Urban Economic Development in South Korea: Centering on the Case of Daegu City

A Study on Limits to Promoting SMEs Networking Policies for Urban Economic Development in South Korea: Centering on the Case of Daegu City

What (if Anything) Can Developing Countries Learn from South Korea?

The economic development of South Korea since 1960 is one of the biggest success stories in the history of development. In just a few decades, South Korea transformed itself from an agricultural society to an industrialized nation exporting high-technology products such as cars, TVs, mobile phones or computers. Furthermore, after more than two decades of authoritarian rule South Korea changed relatively peacefully to a democratic society in 1987. On the other hand, many developing countries in Africa, Latin America or South Asia still face economic stagnation and enormous development problems: Poverty, inequality, bad health, a low life expectancy, illiteracy, ethnic and religious conflicts and discrimination of women are a daily occurrence. Observing these large differences in the development level of South Korea and today’s developing countries, this article explores, what numerous underperforming countries can learn from the South Korean development model. This article argues that it will be very difficult, if not impossible, for today’s developing countries to imitate the South Korean development model by simply adopting similar policies and formal institutions because, apart from conventional explications, informal institutions shaped by Confucianism (“Asian values”) and specific historical circumstances played a key role in the economic development of South Korea. Nevertheless, there are still some lessons to be learnt from South Korea.

Gender Empowerment in South Korean Development: Lessons for Foreign Aid

Souch Korea's rapid economic development in the 20th century had in its core women's employment in labor-intensive, export industries. This paper examines South Korea's economic development through the lens of women's employment and gender empowerment. Although women's empowerment was not part of a goal of South Korea's development, large mobilization of women in the exporting light manufacturing sector eventually led to women's empowerment. Using OECD/DAC's guidelines on gender mainstreaming and gender equality, the paper examines how the Souch Korean experience can provide an alternative to women's empowerment in developing countries. We conclude that there has to be greater sensitivity to address gender-related issues including gender-mainstreaming and gender-sensitive budgets in order to help women attain economic as well as political empowerment in development cooperation.

Foreign Aid and Economic Development: The Success Story of South Korea*

By joining the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development in December 2009, South Korea became the first country to do so after having been a recipient of aid for about 50 years. Once one of the poorest nations in the world and a major aid recipient, South Korea has emerged as the thirteenth largest economy in the world and a major donor country. Throughout South Korea's rapid development period, foreign assistance played a critical role in producing the country's miraculous economic growth. In fact, South Korea is one of the very few cases in which foreign aid succeeded in promoting self‐supporting economic development of the recipient country. This article deals mainly with foreign assistance and economic development in South Korea and explains how foreign aid was used and how it contributed to the economic development of South Korea, focusing on the role of government ownership and commitment. In South Korea, foreign aid was employed successfully to overcome various national challenges and to support state‐led development projects, spurring economic development. In particular, this paper highlights the importance of strong government commitment and ownership, with which South Korea effectively managed foreign aid and minimized institutional cost. The South Korean case contrasts with many other developing countries in which foreign aid has been largely wasted and failed to bring about self‐supporting economic development of the recipient countries.

Gender, ageing and agency: street entrepreneurs and dressmakers in a Korean marketplace

The generation of workers who contributed to the rapid economic development of South Korea since the 1960s have been marginalised socially and economically as they age. In particular, ageing and aged women engaged in marginalised economic activities have been excluded from current national and urban development policies. This article explores the lives of female street entrepreneurs and dressmakers of the Tongdaemun Shijang market area in Seoul, the capital city of South Korea. The article argues that the urban economy needs to be understood as diverse and open, and ageing and aged women are economically and socially active agents within it.

Өмнөд Солонгосын эдийн засгийн үсрэнгүй хөгжил ба таван жилийн төлөвлөгөөнүүдийн онцлог шинж

English title: The rapid economic development in South Korea and particularities of five year plans of development

The territorial politics of regulation under state capitalism: Regional parties and the politics of local economic development in South Korea

This paper examines the relations between the conditions for, and the diverse forms of, local development politics. It does this by addressing a specific form of local development politics encountered in South Korea: a politics of regionalism. This is conceptualised in two stages. At an abstract level, the paper theorises the politics of local economic development in terms of the territorialisation of regulatory processes. On this basis, conceptual links are provided between the conditions for, and the forms of, local development politics by focusing on how the nature of party politics can influence the ways in which the politics of regulation is territorially constructed. Empirically, this paper explores the social and institutional conditions that have facilitated the penetration of regionalist party politics into the politics of local economic development in South Korea. More specifically, it examines the political processes, through which: local economic development initiatives, organised by local actors in Daegu (a central city in south-eastern Korea), brought about tensions with local actors in Busan (another big city in the south-east) around central government policies; and, the interlocal tension between Daegu and Busan became intertwined with a territorialised party politics and conditioned the rise of political regionalism in Daegu in the mid 1990s.

Revolutions from above: Worker training as trasformismo in South Korea

While making very substantial changes to the population's working conditions, government strategies to foster economic development in South Korea have historically attempted to keep worker involvement, in terms of influence on the process, to a bare minimum. Applying the Gramscian concept of passive revolution, this article analyses governance mechanisms and production relations over a history of authoritarianism and up to the contemporary period of democratic reform. Trasformismo, which is a strategy of limited concessions, has been provided via vocational training for workers. Despite this attempt at inclusion, it is concluded that workers have not enjoyed full participation in negotiation for their welfare at any time in Korean history.

A Cultural Analysis of South Korea's Economic Prospects

This study analyses cultural effects on economic development in South Korea. It introduces the concept of transaction costs as an operational intermediary between culture and economic development. Using this approach, it is found that culture affects economic development through its impacts on transaction costs in the static case. In the dynamic case, culture affects the economy through its impacts on the creative capacity of citizens. To assess the role of culture in future economic development, recent changes in Korean culture are examined. These include rising individualism and declining sense of community and trust; weaker appreciation of cooperation, compromise, and acceptance of dissent, and rising inclination towards confrontation; and the failing rule of law and rising perception of injustice. These all raise transaction costs. In addition, the future orientation is fading, as suggested by decreasing savings and investment rates, and by decline in the fertility rate. In view of these recent changes, Korean culture will have a negative effect on the future economy, compared to its positive influence in earlier decades from the 1960s. Culture is therefore not ceteris paribus. Even if all else remains the same, the prospects of the Korean economy will be tainted by the influence of culture.

Territorialized party politics and the politics of local ecomomic development: State-led industrialization and political regionalism in South Korea

Abstract For the last three decades, the politics of regionalism has significantly influenced South Korean politics. This paper addresses the historical origin of regionalist politics in South Korea, with focus on the sociopolitical and institutional conditions under which territory-based political cleavages first emerged in South Korea in the early 1970s. In particular, it examines the ways in which the politics of local economic development in South Korea was turned into a politics of regionalism in the early 1970s, within the specific context of uneven regional development that was attributable to the territoriality of state regulation and representation, and the territorialization of party politics. More specifically, the analytical focus is on examining: (1) how the territoriality of state-led capitalist industrialization in South Korea was responsible for increased regional economic disparities in the 1960s and 1970s; (2) how the politics of local economic development, organized in different regions in reaction to state-conditioned uneven regional development, contributed to the construction of regionally differentiated political and economic interests; and (3) how political parties constructed territorialized social bases by utilizing regionally differentiated political and economic interests, thereby, leading to the rise of regionalist politics.

America's Korea, Korea's Vietnam

Atrocities committed by American soldiers against Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War have once again become an issue of public debate in the United States, yet similar actions by South Korean troops fighting America's war in Vietnam remain virtually unknown in the West. The Republic of Korea (ROK) dispatched more than 300,000 combat troops to Vietnam between 1965 and 1973, but after decades of enforced silence by successive authoritarian governments, Koreans have only recently begun to grapple with the ambiguous legacy of the Vietnam War for South Korea. In the spring and summer of 2000, testimonies in the South Korean media by Korean veterans of the Vietnam War revealed for the first time detailed, extensive accounts of Korean atrocities against Vietnamese civilians. These revelations, and the controversy they triggered within South Korea, bring into bold relief the role of Koreans in America's Vietnam War and the role of the Vietnam War in the political and economic development of South Korea.

The Origins of Societal Power in South Korea: Understanding the Physical and Human Legacies of Japanese Colonialism

In seeking to explain the social, political and economic development of South Korea since liberation in 1945, many scholars have begun paying increasing attention to the significance of Korea’s colonial past. Most of these scholars have, for very good reasons, focused on fundamental—even revolutionary—changes in Korea's institutional structure, which for centuries had been dominated by a landed aristocracy ‘intent upon the preservation of its social, economic, and political privileges.’ Colonialism, to be more specific, replaced the factionalized and conflict-ridden institutions of aristocracy (and dynastic rule) with a modern, highly centralized, and extremely capable state apparatus, one which was used to reshape Korean society in any number of ways during Japan's 35 years of domination. The ‘strong state’ is, in fact, an enduring and undeniably powerful legacy of colonialism.

The Four Asian tigers: economic development and the global political economy

The Regional and Global Contexts for Economic Development: K.Y. Shin, The Political Economy of Economic Growth in East Asia: South Korea and Taiwan. V.D. Cha, Defining Security in East Asia: History, Hotspots, and Horizon-Gazing. I. Numazaki, The Export-Oriented Industrialization of Pacific Rim Nations and Their Presence in the Global Market. The Actors and Institutions of Economic Development: G. Gereffi, Commodity Chains and Regional Divisions of Labor in East Asia. H.-Y. Cho and E.M. Kim, State Autonomy and Its Social Conditions for Economic Development in South Korea and Taiwan. K. Fields, Is Small Beautiful? The Political Economy of Taiwan's Small-Scale Industry. F.C. Deyo, Industrial Flexibility, Economic Restructuring, and East Asian Labor. S.-H. Lee, Crisis in Korea and the IMF Control. Index.

An empirical analysis of South Korea's economic development and public expenditures growth

Economists and political scientists have long maintained that there exists a one-way relationship between the size of government and economic growth. That is, it is hypothesized that economic growth is the cause of government expenditure growth and not the other way around. New research, based on the Keynesian paradigm, suggests that the causality runs from growth in government spending to growth in GDP. Concern with causality has spawned a growing body of new research by Landau (1983 and 1986), Kormendi and McGuire (1985), Singh and Sahni (1984), Marsden (1984), Conte and Darrat (1988), and Ram (1986). While some of these studies support the Keynesian paradigm, others find contrary evidence. In this study, we use Korean data to conduct causality tests of Wagner's law. Further, we develop a model consisting of a government growth equation and a GDP growth equation. Again, using Korean data, we estimate these equations and compare the results with those of Wagnerian causality tests. We conclude that the Korean government expenditures have not contributed to economic growth.

Economic Development in South Korea: By-product of Military Regimes

AbstractThis paper is a brief account of ‘miraculous’ economic development in postwar South Korea. The paper provides a short appraisal of existing perspectives regarding Korean economic development and discusses how three recent military regimes utilized current opportunities in relation to the international political economy situation and Korean society including its Confucian culture. Focus is given to the ways in which military regimes have constantly pursued development as a way of justifying their regimes. While pursuing growth and exported-oriented policies, the regimes in South Korea adopted a tight control over industrial relations and a low wage policy towards its work force.

Government and Economic Development in South Korea, 1961-79

Government and Economic Development in South Korea, 1961-79

The government, financial system, and large private enterprises in the economic development of South Korea

The paper investigates the main characteristics of the government-business relationship in South Korea in the past three decades to find out how it may have contributed to South Korea's economic development. It proposes that the government and large private enterprises in South Korea should be viewed as constituting an internal organization, namely a quasi-internal organization. As such, extensive intervention by the government with South Korea's financial system can be viewed as an internal capital market and, consequently, it could have led to a more efficient allocation of credit than possible in a free-market financial system. It also argues that the quasi-internal organization has made it possible for the government to efficiently implement its developmental policies. It is, however, pointed out that for the quasi-internal organization to be successful in accelerating the pace of economic development the country must have a political leadership committed to the goal of economic development and must adopt an outward-oriented development policy.

Sustaining economic development in South Korea: Lessons from Japan

Sustaining economic development in South Korea: Lessons from Japan

Culture and Institutions in the Economic Development of Korea

The author examines the effect of Confucian cultural and institutional influences on the economic development of South Korea. He suggests that culture influences the institutions that societies adopt to minimize the cost of transactions among the decision units of the society, and thus must be considered in explaining economic development. The relationship in Korea between the public and private systems is described as a partnership. Lee connects the efficiency of the institutions of government-business relationship to the impact of the Confucian cultural foundation. The government-business relationship in Korea is described as a quasi-internal organization, with the government in the role of senior partner and large private enterprises as junior partners. The acceptance of the quasiinternal organization in Korea is attributed to both government authority and cultural conditioning.

Models of development: A comparative study of economic growth in South Korea and Taiwan - A review

This compact volume presents an unusually comprehensive review of the economic development of Taiwan and Korea whose sustained real growth over more than two decades has incontrovertibly demonstrated that their success is not a fluke. Economists and policymakers outside these two countries have therefore increasingly directed their attention to the transferability of the Taiwan-Korea model or, more precisely, models. For persons interested in the two countries per se a more pressing concern is focussed on the future. Can past economic success be carried over into the future? Even more importantly, can real economic growth bring about overall modernization and development in these two societies so that the two "newly industrializing countries" as of today can before long be hailed as models of "newly developed societies"? Of the three principal papers in the study, S. Y. Kwack's review (Ch. 3) of South Korea's economic development through 1981 contains a most detailed survey of the domestic and external aspects of the Korean economy. R. H. Myers' Ch. 2, less comprehensive in details, has, however, the advantage of having treated the "philosophy" or ideology underlying Taiwan's policy of economic development in the long run. T. Scito vsky's comparative analysis of the two countries' experiences in 1965-1981, written independently of the two country studies, nevertheless makes up a most fitting and complementary third contribution; it contains some insightful observations and raises questions that the thoughtful reader will wish to ask himself. Lau's introductory chapter provides a real summary and comparison based on the two case studies. Limitation of space is a handicap, which probably explains why the overall international context of both Taiwan's and Korea's development strategies in the 1970s has not been presented. This omission in a primarily economic discussion is understandable. However, to readers unfamiliar with contemporary Asian development, the omission leaves out certain policy considerations that accounted for the different development strategies adopted by the two countries, thus precluding a judicious assessment of the wisdom of the two countries' leaders in making their respective choices.