The South Korean Economy: Towards a New Explanation of an Economic Miracle/Reforming Korea's Industrial Conglomerates/The Korea Diaspora in the World Economy

摘要

These three small volumes (each within 200 pages) form part of a rapidly growing literature on an economy whose recent experience offers a variety of lessons -- both positive and negative -- on available paths toward economic transformation and modernization. Kim's South Korean Economy is an effort to explain the success and failures of the Korean model of late industrialization, with its emphasis on heavy and chemical industry development and reliance on the large corporate combines. The approach is to analyze wage growth patterns in individual industries as a measure of industrial performance, using cluster analysis and other pattern-discerning statistical methods to identify causal roles of investment, interest-rate policy, and (impliedly) government. The book would have benefited from more editing, as a wordy style and somewhat loose use of English grammar make it more difficult to penetrate than it needs to be. The near-exclusive reliance on a single statistical approach makes it difficult to be confident in the interpretations offered. Still, the book raises important questions about what it calls the "East Asian" model of industrialization, and makes a serious effort to answer them based on the facts. The chapter comparing Korean and Japanese experience brings out the interesting differences (importance of foreign capital, export reliance, and extent to which large combines have been favored over smaller enterprises or SMEs) as well as similarities. Other chapters explore the differential effects, now diminishing, on SMEs of the government's past approach, and the future prospect for curing consequent financial weaknesses and successfully embracing the newer digital and service sector technologies.