A late industrializing nation-state, South Korea was characterized as “the miracle of the Han river” up until the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. And it was praised for rapidly overcoming the crisis, both by international financial organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and by nation-states that went through contemporaneous national economic crises. Scholars and experts attributed these achievements to the role of the South Korean state and the strong government initiatives and intervention in business and markets that had marked its administration and bureaucracy since the Korean War.
Scholarly work on the developmental state (Kim 1997; Woo-Cumings 1999) centered on whether the Korean government under the military regimes developed national wealth by largely controlling the big conglomerates (chaebŏl) or whether the regimes and the capitalists collaborated to produce economic growth. Despite the significant attention given to the economic...
