آشنایی با توسعه اقتصادی کره از یک چشم انداز همکاری تکاملی

This paper applied a co-evolutionary perspective to understanding the economic development history of Korea, which is said to have shown almost miraculous economic growth. After reviewing economic policies and the economic situation over the last half-century, we categorized the dynamic competitive strategies of the government and recognized the co-evolutionary development. By way of illustration, we documented the case of Korean automobile industry from a co-evolutionary perspective. In conclusion, we argue that ‘learning-by-doing’ and the competitive dynamic strategies of the government and market forces are the key factors in understanding the forces underlying this economic success.

Korea is known as a country that showed miraculous economic growth, but suffered a devastating economic crisis. Due to these contradictory experiences, there seem to be no clear-cut assessments of past Korean economic performance and the lessons derived from it. The controversies over what gave rise to the past economic performance are often accompanied by talk of political issues, political calculations, and even conspiracies. Therefore, it is a legitimate study to seek to extract the essence of Korean economic growth and any valuable lessons from it. There are many issues involved in the causes of Korean economic growth; labor exploitation, the economic concentration of chaebol, Korean-type conglomerates, a laggard but supportive financial sector, and so on. In this paper, we would like to take a more fundamental perspective, namely, a co-evolutionary perspective, to review Korean economic history.

Co-evolution refers to successive changes among two or more ecological interdependent but unique species so that their evolutionary trajectories intertwine overtime, adapting to each other. When we look at the economic development of Korea from a co-evolutionary perspective, we can conclude that the private sector and government co-evolved successfully, adapting to each other whenever needed. In the 1960s and 1970s, the government initiated the knowledge base and the private sector responded to this by learning and expanding its knowledge. In the 1980s, the government focused on the economic stabilization and reform of the industrial support system. Responding to this, the private sector became the main force of knowledge creation and accumulation. After the 1980s, the role of government became relatively less explicit and the importance of the private sector has been strengthened further. This implies that the government has adapted itself to the changing market created by the domestic private sector and global competition. Knowledge has lately received greater attention as a main source of transition in the Korean economy; corporate-strategy theorists in particular have emphasized the idea of the firm as a body of knowledge. Even though a more refined view of knowledge has recently come to the fore, knowledge has been very important in industrial activities and it can be accumulated by a supportive cultural and policy environment, which the government is responsible for fostering. Weber (1930, pp. 24–25) argued as follows: