Harvard East Asian Monographs
2 primary works • 6 total works
Book 350
From Miracle to Maturity
by Barry Eichengreen, Dwight H. Perkins, and Kwan-ho Sin
The economic growth of South Korea has been a remarkable success story. After the Korean War, the country was one of the poorest economies on the planet; by the twenty-first century, it had become a middle-income country, a member of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (the club of advanced economies), and home to some of the world’s leading industrial corporations. And yet, many Koreans are less than satisfied with their country’s economic performance, given the continuing financial volatility and sluggish growth since the Korean economic crisis of 1997–1998.
From Miracle to Maturity offers a comprehensive qualitative and quantitative analysis of the growth of the Korean economy, starting with the aggregate sources of growth (growth of the labor force, the stock of capital, and productivity) and then delving deeper into the roles played by structural change, exports, foreign investment, and financial development. The authors provide a detailed examination of the question of whether the Korean economy is now underperforming and ask, if so, what can be done to solve the problem.
Book 440
Financial Liberalization and Economic Development in Korea, 1980-2020
by Yung Chul Park, Joon Kyung Kim, and Hail Park
Since the early 1980s, Korea's financial development has been a tale of liberalization and opening. After the 1997 financial crisis, great strides were made in building a market-oriented financial system through sweeping reforms for deregulation and the opening of financial markets. However, the new system failed to steer the country away from a credit card boom and bust in 2003, a liquidity crisis in 2008, and a run on its savings banks in 2011, and has been severely tested again by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Financial liberalization, clearly, has been no panacea.
This study analyzes the deepening of and structural changes in Korea's financial system since the early 1980s and presents the empirical results of the effects of financial development on economic growth, stability, and the distribution of income. It finds that, contrary to conventional wisdom, financial liberalization has contributed little to fostering the growth and stability of the Korean economy and has exacerbated income distribution problems. Are there any merits in financial liberalization? The authors answer this query through empirical examinations of the theories of finance and growth. They point to a clear need to further improve the efficiency, soundness, and stability of Korean financial institutions and markets.
The Economic and Social Modernization of the Republic of Korea
by Edward S Mason, Mahn Je Kim, Dwight H. Perkins, Kwang Suk Kim, and David C. Cole
This ninth title in the series Studies in the Modernization of the Republic of Korea offers new insights into the role of finance in a rapidly developing country. Combining history and theory, it provides a rigorous test of previous theoretical propositions. The study illustrates the complexity of the Korean financial system and the danger of easy generalization from partial evidence.
The two major components of the financial system are brought into focus—one regulated and statistically recorded, the other unregulated, unrecorded. The burden of financial intermediation shifts from one to the other largely in response to government policy measures. By looking only at the regulated sector, previous studies have often misperceived the role of the financial system and the effects of government policies. The financial scandal in Seoul in May 1982 vividly demonstrated that the unregulated part of the system is still important and that overregulation of the “modern” part generates strong pressures for perpetuating the illegal, unregulated, “traditional” financial institutions.
South Korea has been held out as an economic miracle-as a country that successfully completed the transition from underdeveloped to developed country status-and as an example of how a middle-income country can continue to move up the technology ladder into the production and export of more sophisticated goods and services. But with these successes have come challenges, among them poverty, inequality, long work hours, financial instability, and complaints about the economic and political power of the country's large corporate conglomerates, or chaebol.
The Korean Economy provides an overview of Korean economic experience since the 1950s, with a focus on the period since democratization in 1987. Successive chapters analyze the Korean experience from the perspectives of political economy, the growth record, industrial organization and corporate governance, financial development and instability, labor and employment, inequality and social policy, and Korea's place in the world economy. A concluding chapter describes the country's economic challenges going forward and how they can best be met. The volume also serves to summarize the findings of companion volumes in the Harvard-Korean Development Institute series on the Korean economy, also published by the Harvard University Asia Center.