Triumphs and Their Discontents: Growth and Inequality in the South Korean Developmental State (original) (raw)

South Korea has long been looked to as an exemplary case of rapid economic expansion. Further, proponents of the South Korean development model have tended to not only extoll its industrial ascent during the 1960s and 1970s but also herald the fact that its breakneck developmental pace was attained in conjunction with a relatively low degree of inequality. This paper challenges this framing on two fronts. First, it delves into the specific historical sequencing of South Korea’s developmental epoch to point to theoretical and empirical problems with the causal association drawn between its state-led development model and the low levels of inequality. Second, the paper draws upon an array of contemporaneous research from the era of rapid growth to reassess the extent to which South Korean society did, in fact, feature a distributional regime that merits the praise found in retrospective accounts. In making both of these arguments, the analysis draws upon Thomas Piketty’s groundbreaking work on inequality. The paper demonstrates that the social processes and institutions catalyzing distributional divergence in South Korea were established long before the neo- liberal-inspired reforms in the 1990s. These conclusions bear significantly upon both our understanding of the South Korean case and its implications for development theory more broadly.