Assessing the Miracle on the Han River

In academic and popular discussion on economic development, some of the most often-cited stories of development success are the so-called “Four Asian Tiger” countries. Consisting of Hong Kong, Signapore, Taiwan and, the subject of this paper, South Korea, these countries have been intensely studied due to their success at achieving rapid growth and human development in the post-World War II period, culminating with their designation as high-income developed economies by the end of the 20th century (Henderson, 1997). A number of explanations have been proferred for why these particular countries were able to succeed where so many others had failed. These range from relatively high human capital pre-development, policy choices incentivizing exports and free trade, relatively low inequality, the shared influence of Confucian cultural norms and many more (Wang, 2007). Of these countries, South Korea is perhaps the most intriguing and striking example, for a number of reasons. According to contemporary figure before the period of economic “take-off” in all of then noted countries, South Korea had the lowest per-capita GDP, with $290 US per capita at PPP, roughly the same as Ghana in the same period, and had limited natural resource wealth (Kim & Heo, 2017). Furthermore, it was a country devastated by both a Japanese colonial occupation and the subsequent Korean War, which removed a large, and at the time relatively more industrialized, area of the country into North Korea. The fact that the country was split in two parts as a result of that war, and that the South prospered…