8 - Conclusion

Summary

These days a frequent lament from scholars not focused on the US or China cases is why they have to work so hard to convince their audience (especially for works under the arduous peer-review process) as to why their case matters. In other words, why should the audience care about the case or puzzle(s) in question? For the scholars themselves, the importance seems obvious but that is likely a mitigated result of self-selection bias. As scholars focused on Asia, and Korea in particular, we have our biases but Korea’s track record of economic and political success is, holding such biases constant, nothing short of astonishing. It was our intent to provide the reader with a firm understanding of the causes and consequences of these empirically counter-intuitive outcomes.

To reiterate, the puzzle this text sought to explain and why audiences outside of the peninsula should care is that South Korea is one of the few postcolonial states to emerge from being one of the least developed polities in the world to one of the wealthiest, having even caught up to its former colonizer in terms of its post-industrialized, knowledge-based economy. In addition to or, as we argue, a result of Korea’s economic miracle, Korea has furthermore emerged as a consolidated, liberal democracy, which we in turn classify as a political triumph for a population that had to endure decades of state-based repression and violence. Thus, in addition to those concerned with Korean studies, those interested in postcolonial economic and political development (i.e. democratization) in general should also have much to find of use and value through a better understanding of the case of Korea. Having established the puzzle, we now move to a summary of our theoretical approach and empirical findings and predictions.

To begin with, while a large portion of this book has been descriptive in nature, our descriptions and explanations were certainly informed by theory and our theoretical guide has been firmly based in not politics alone, nor economics alone, but by political economy proper. The logic for this is that all economic decisions are ultimately the observable implications and outcomes of political calculations.