Between Development and State: Recasting Korean Dirigisme

Abstract:     
This paper offers an alternative understanding and a critique of how Korean development has been interpreted by scholars such as Chalmers Johnson, Alice Amsden, Robert Wade, and Peter Evans. By joining together two areas of discussion - development and the state - often carried on separately and by different professional and academic groups, the present paper provides a new, deeper and more accurate account of Korean dirigisme, or system of state-led development. Developmental state proponents slight the fact that Korean dirigisme harmed equity, democracy, social cohesion, and thus the peoples ability to take the initiative, innovate or form viable civil society. By looking at the way in which the state meddled with the economy as a deliberately selected course, an analytic account can be taken of the dysfunction of developmental statism, which I also term diseased dirigisme. The inequity between the often-bitter deprivations suffered by small firm operators and other ordinary citizens and the sweet gains reaped by a few big business conglomerates, known as chaebol, remains symptomatic of Korea's dirigiste disease. The dominant themes in the current economic discourses are privatisation, marketization, deregulation and the rollback of the welfare state. By linking the state-led and people-centered arguments, however, the paper contributes to fresh discourse about principles of policymaking and state-action to broaden the valuation of development beyond economic efficiency or competitiveness.

Keywords: State, Statism, Development, People-centeredness, Korean Political Economy

JEL Classifications: O53

Working Paper Series