Pil Ho Kim

From development to development cooperation: foreign aid, country ownership, and the developmental state in South Korea

South Korea’s phenomenal economic development in the second half of the 20th century from one of the poorest “basket case” states to having an economy that can boast to being 13th in the world, has led to new global roles for the country. In January 2010, South Korea joined the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as its 24th member, signaling its growing role as a major donor of foreign aid. In November 2010, South Korea successfully hosted the first G20 Summit Meeting in Asia and introduced the development agenda. In November 2011, the fourth and final High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF-4), hosted by the OECD and the World Bank, took place in Busan, South Korea.

Political Preferences and Attitudes Towards the Welfare State: Cross-National Comparison of Germany, Sweden, the U.S. and Japan

This study attempts to build a causal model of attitudes towards the welfare state in Japan and to compare it to those of Germany, Sweden and the U.S., which represent conservative, socialist, and liberal welfare regime respectively. The effect of political preferences on attitudes towards the welfare state is the focus of the comparison. The basic premise of this comparison is that welfare attitudes vary across countries, bearing the characteristics of the given welfare regime that they belong to. Structural equation modeling and path analysis are conducted on a large-scale international survey dataset, ISSP 1996. Each country is first analyzed separately, and then all four countries are compared to each other. The single-country analysis reveals the cross-national diversity of welfare attitudes, while the effect of political preferences on the welfare attitudes exhibits a bifurcate pattern: in Sweden and the U.S. it is quite strong, relatively weak in Germany, and not even statistically significant in Japan. The comparative analysis further confirms this pattern. Therefore, I conclude that Japan is closest to the German conservative regime in terms of attitudes and political preferences, sharing welfare conservatism that credits the conservative party for building a welfare state.

Locating Neoliberalism in East Asia: Neoliberalizing Spaces in Developmental States:

Neoliberalism is a loaded term, for it is mostly invoked by its critics rather than supposed advocates. As an ideology, it has a long pedigree and coherent structure to claim a hegemonic position in the post-Keynesian global capitalist economy. As a political project to restore a market-fundamentalist socioeconomic order, it is deemed to have been quite successful in the West, at least until the 2008 global financial crisis. The editors of Locating Neoliberalism in East Asia extend this line of critique, laid out by David Harvey and others, to those so-called East Asian NIEs (Newly Industrialized Economies) that used to follow a non-liberal, state-led path toward capitalism. Editors Bae-gyoon Park, Richard Child Hill, and Asato Saito refer to the dominant ideology in East Asia as ‘‘developmentalism,’’ and pit it against neoliberalism to explain the changing geospatial policies in the region. An immediate problem with this theoretical framing is how to define developmentalism at the same level as neoliberalism. Here, the book draws heavily from the developmental state literature, which has gained currency in explaining the political project of East Asian capitalism from Japan on down to the NIEs. However, it is difficult to see developmentalism as an articulated form of ideology matching up against its (neo)liberal counterpart in the post-World War II era. Japanese, South Korean, or Taiwanese economic bureaucrats might well hold a nationalist outlook and pursue neomercantilist policies, but I doubt they would quote Friedrich List or the German Historical School to justify their position and refute the neoliberal arguments based on the work of Friedrich von Hayek or Milton Friedman. While the asymmetry between neoliberalism and developmentalism remains unresolved in this volume, the main point all the contributing chapters converge on is that the state still holds the key to neoliberal reforms in the region. The strongest case for developmentalism’s survival against the neoliberal onslaught appears to be Japan, where the industrial cluster policy and changes in urban and regional planning have been allowing for decentralization, deregulation, and increasing private-sector participation, without the state necessarily losing overall control. Furthermore, Japan’s official development assistance (ODA) to Thailand shows that the so-called ‘‘flying geese’’ style product life-cycle theory is still relevant to its long-term economic strategy for regional division of labor. The chapters on South Korea show that this country is more inclined toward neoliberalism than the rest of the region, although here as well the developmental state is not exactly withering away. Since the early 1980s, the Korean developmental state has been juggling different pressures for and against economic liberalization, which have been mounting along with the parallel process of democratization. One upshot of such a complex situation is the ‘‘bipolar’’ character of industrial cluster policy, as the Korean government had to ‘‘chase two rabbits’’ of international competitiveness and domestic regional equity at the same time. When it comes to urban and regional policies, the Korean government has been even more activist in terms of deregulation and privatization, especially since the Asian financial crisis of 1997–8. Even though the two successive ‘‘progressive’’ liberal administrations (1998–2007) presided over what could be considered banner years for neoliberalism in South Korea, the contributors are cautious about announcing the demise of developmentalism just yet. This is because (1) the state is still very interventionist in carrying out neoliberal policies, and (2) the reach of such policies is limited by domestic political considerations, as shown in the ‘‘spatially selective liberalization’’ of Free Economic Zones. But as the authors concur with Harvey that the state has to be even 398 Reviews

Introduction: The South Korean Development Experience

It has become almost a cliche within the global ODA (Official Development Assistance) community to stress South Korea’s unique position as a former aid recipient turned into an emerging donor. South Korea received foreign aid of nearly USD 13 billion over the latter half of the 20th century. In 2010 alone, however, it provided to the developing world an amount nominally equal to what it had received (although much smaller in real terms), and plans to increase its annual ODA to USD 30 billion by 2015. Not surprisingly, many developing countries show a keen interest in how South Korea achieved such a feat, and the South Korean government is eager to promote its past development experience as the distinctive strength of the “Korean ODA model.”