Bureaucratic Politics in Industrial Development: Comparing Automobile Industrial Policies in Korea and Taiwan during the 1970-80s

This paper analyzes the process of development of the automobile industries in Korea and Taiwan, focusing on their bureaucratic politics based on discursive coordination. Despite similar conditions in the early 1970s, the automobile industries in Korea and Taiwan led to divergent paths, focusing on exports of finished cars and parts, respectively. This study holds that this difference is not an automatic result of a given industrial structure, but it came from the divergence of the automobile industrial policies in the two countries. Korea aimed to establish internationally competitive national champions by vertically integrating domestic firms, while Taiwan targeted niche market and fostered strategic suppliers for multinational companies by integrating into their global production system. However, unlike previous state-centered studies that focus on the cohesiveness and power distribution within the state, this paper emphasizes that the differentiation of the automobile industrial policies of the two countries, which started with similar goals, is the result of efforts to justify their policies within the state as well as socially in the competition between bureaucrats over the initiative of the policies.