Maybe were arguing over semantics . Yes Park favored certain corporations but then again the US has no bid contracts and Western corporations contribute money those elected officials that grant them favors. Why single out South Korea as a den of inequity?
It's not singling them out, just pointing out that corruption is not necessarily an impediment to high growth, and so the success of the Asian tigers contrasted with the relative stagnation of SE Asia can't just be explained away by using the stereotype that one group is well-educated and hard-working while the other is lazy and corrupt.Maybe were arguing over semantics . Yes Park favored certain corporations but then again the US has no bid contracts and Western corporations contribute money those elected officials that grant them favors. Why single out South Korea as a den of inequity?
Leftyhunter
I never used that stereotype. I never said anyone was lazy.Different countries have different circumstances. A circa 1960s foreign investor or businessman is far more likely to invest in relatively politically stable South Korea or Taiwan vs SEA. The work force in SK and ROC is more capable of industrial work at a very competitive wage rate. Both countries are at peace although a very tense peace. As time wore on and communisim receded countries such has Vietnam and China could compete in manufacturing products. Still SK and ROC had a head start and that's why they are where they are today.
SK and TW were not politically stable in the 1960s, both were essentially Bonapartist regimes that worked hand in glove with the corporate sector to industrialize while using mass repression and violence to stamp out any hint of leftist sentiment. Both only truly democratized as the Cold War ended, by which time they had established themselves to the point where allowing petty partisanship back into the public sphere wasn't going to ruin the entire economy. All of the Asian tigers also lucked out in that China's reform and opening up process began just as their growth was starting to plateau, which gave them a place to offload their low-value manufacturing as well as a gigantic export market, if not for that they would have likely ended up in the same middle income trap that many formerly promising economies did. However, they are sort of stuck in a kind of "upper middle income trap" now, since their lack of strategic autonomy and geopolitical clout means that they have no ability to dictate terms of trade, and having to subordinate their own interests to those of the US will likely doom them in the long run.
Yes South Korea had a student coup against Sygman Rhee and their was a brief republic but once Park succeeded in his coup SK was politically stable although not a democracy as was Taiwan under the KMT. Countries that are corrupt and not stable don't have growing economies . Luck is good but SK and ROC played their cards right. As for the future who knows but if I had a choice between living in North Korea, Cuba , China, Russia or South Korea it wouldn't be a hard choice.
Some people argue that democracy comes after growth: as people get richer, they develop the desire to get political representation after they satiated their more basic desires for material goods.
It is a two-way street, democracy, and growth helping each other. But poor countries are not fertile ground for democracy, poor people want help from the government, which doesn't have resources to provide and so resorts to dictatorship.
That's not exactly true either, each of the Western powers had at best a severely limited franchise during their initial periods of industrialization, and much of that growth was buoyed by access to cheap natural resources and labor from the colonies and slave trade. By the time any of them came anywhere close to living up to their supposed ideals, they had already started outsourcing most of their production to the global south. The issue is that growth requires resources to be concentrated in a small enough group of actors for the entire economy to coordinate on a singular agenda, which of course is incompatible with any kind of meaningful democracy. States can democratize when they reach the point where the leftover scraps that the masses can access become good enough to survive on, so throwing the plebs some voting rights won't cause them to bring down the entire state-industrial apparatus. Democratizing too soon just means too many hands grabbing for a slice, which makes it impossible to execute on any kind of long term plan. Of course, another requirement is that the elites in charge also need to be farsighted enough to actually invest these resources properly instead of just stealing from the public, which paradoxically means that while petty, low level corruption debilitates an economy, systematically rigging the entire system can actually be beneficial.
I think thats the consensus in the development literature.
I think that is not true: as development is correlated with democracy, the statistical likelihood of a country being democracy and poor at the same time is low.
And they say that leftists are naive...
It was probably just kicking the can down the road, the powers that be figured that in the time it would take for China to develop into a true economic rival, we'd have some sort of plan in place to take them down. Whether those plans will actually work, we'll have to wait and see.
Or maybe and also hopefully not. Perhaps because it also would not really be in US long term strategic interests to have close allies in Western Pacific doomed to that kind of "upper middle income trap" that you mentioned.
It peaked during the early 1950s, after which it fell apart and devolved into groups of bandits extorting from infrastructure project developers. In several cases, it was even buying firearms from corrupt military officials.
Except for two short periods, Japan has been run by the same political party for more than fifty years. It has managed to do so because it promoted successful economic policies that would later be described as "the East Asian Miracle." That's not exactly a dictatorship, in the same sense that several Singaporeans will argue that they're not under a dictatorship because they're free to vote for anyone else but still choose Lee's political party (ironically, Harvard conducted surveys in China and discovered the same, i.e., high approval ratings for the Communist Party), but it can be seen as a dictatorship in light of authoritarianism and challenges to Western ideals of individualism and civil liberties.
It has had internal corruption across four centuries of Spanish colonization, but the Communist insurgency started only after WW2, and sputtered after a decade. The reason isn't because the military did well or that the Communists failed miserably but because Filipinos are overwhelmingly pro-Christian (most are Catholic) and pro-Western (several int'l surveys reveal that, ironically, not just the U.S. but many U.S. Presidents from both parties have high approval ratings in the Philippines than in the U.S.), and thus will never accept Communism. That's why the best that the CCP could do was use NDF fronts to manipulate government and get donations from gullible Europeans.
