Adjustment of Developmental State: The Korean Case from Comparative Perspectives

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how the Korean economy has continued to grow after industrialization in the 1960s. Existing studies on the Korean economic development model not only have a weak point in understanding the characteristics of the Korean development model from a comparative perspective but also have limitations in explaining the changes since the late 1990s. This paper first maintains that the growth of the Korean economy has been able to be continued not through market competition like liberalist arguments, but through the continuous operation of the developmental state, and second, not through the persistence of past growth models as the claims of classical developmentalists, but through the changes of the Korean economic growth strategy. The Korean economy shifted its direction from the input-oriented growth strategy to the innovation-driven growth strategy. And the transformation of this growth strategy was not the result of private initiative adaptation but the result of policy implementation based on the developmental state’ s ideational shift, not on the simple continuation of the state power or means.