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

Globalization and social inequality in South Korea

2010

This paper discusses the process of the neo-liberal globalization and its impact on social inequality in South Korea, exploring the seemingly contradictory development of market despotism on the one hand and social welfare on the other hand. The financial crisis triggered by hasty globalization of the Kim Young Sam government led to the economic crisis. The newly elected president Kim Dae Jung accepted the rescue package of international financial organization such as the IMF and the World Bank, which have played the role of preacher of Washington Consensus. As a consequence of 10 years of the neoliberal globalization, state despotism fortified by the authoritarian developmental state was replaced by market despotism, with increasing inequality and expanding poverty. The international financial organization demanded the Korean government an introduction of new social welfare policy and an expansion of the existing welfare program to guarantee neo-liberal reform. Social welfare was c...

From Miracle to Crisis and Back: The Political Economy of South Korean Long-Term Development

This article analyses the process of economic development and associated political transformations in South Korea since the mid-1960s. It claims that, as in the rest of East Asia, capital accumulation in South Korea has revolved around the production of specific industrial goods for world markets using the relatively cheap and highly disciplined local workforce for simplified labour processes, as appendages of the machine or in manual assembly operations. This modality of accumulation resulted from changes in the forms of production of relative surplus value on a global scale through the development of computerisation and robotisation, and the concomitant transformation in the productive attributes of the collective worker of large-scale industry. The article identifies the main characteristics of the political and economic relations through which the structural transformation of the Korean society came about throughout the period studied, as a form of realising the global unity of the process of capitalist development. This analysis not only supports the claims made about the specific characteristics of the East Asian processes of capitalist development. It also shows the intrinsic unity of seemingly diverse political-economy processes, as forms of realisation of the transformations of Korean society.

The Developmental Sources of South Korean Neoliberalism

Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2021

How do South Korea’s developmental legacies influence its contemporary political economy? The discourse surrounding this question has tended to diverge over the extent to which South Korea’s state-led developmental model has been supplanted by a market-led, neoliberal mode of political-economic organization. Though this debate has indeed fostered many important individual contributions, it has also yielded a muddled and ambiguous theoretical landscape. To clarify this cluttered terrain, this paper draws from recent advances in the study of neoliberalism to establish critical points of consonance between statist perspectives on Korean development and neoliberalism. To this end, it identifies key threads of continuity binding South Korea’s developmental past with its neoliberal present. The paper finds that critical aspects of the developmental state’s interaction with society, from coercion to ideological suasion, furnished elemental building blocks to those actively constructing a South Korean neoliberalism. Thus, exploring these historical contours produces a fresh means for apprehending the interactions of enduring statist developmental legacies with contemporary neoliberal reforms, both theoretically and empirically. As such, this study yields an improved set of conceptual tools for grasping the complex empirical phenomena shaping the interplay of neoliberalism, developmentalism, and democracy within contemporary South Korea.

The capitalist stage of consumerism and South Korean development

Journal of Contemporary Asia, 2006

The article maintains that only through the prism of analysis of the modalities and institutional architecture of accumulation in the post-Second World War stage of capitalism is it possible to adequately treat questions of causality in South Korean development or similarly, address the specific role of the capitalist state.]

Capitalist maturity and South Korea's post‐development conundrum

Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies, 2018

South Korea's post World War II economic development trajectory is well known. From an impoverished warn‐torn nation, the country has progressed on all fronts. However, the objective is to focus on the “post‐development” question, namely, what does a country do after it becomes prosperous. To put it another way, what are some of the emergent challenges that successful development poses for Korea, and how might it tackle them. I use the concept of capitalist maturity to denote Korea's current state of prosperity and examine some of the economic, social, and political consequences. Some of these post‐development conundrums I argue have resulted from the transformation of Korea's state–business development partnership to a business–state political partnership in the context of a democratizing Korea. This paper examines the challenges and some of the policy options to address them, including the rebalancing of the state–business relationship.