Abstract
Since the 1960s, South Korea has achieved outstanding economic growth. It has been very successful in catching up to the level of advanced countries and has become a good example of ‘compressed growth’, in which a country achieves rapid development in decades that took more than a century in developed countries. However, rapid economic growth was not simply a smooth progress as there were crises, like in the mid-1980s when Korea lost export competitiveness due to rising wage rates. Internally, a rise in wage rates in the domestic market led to an increase in production costs. Externally, Southeast Asian countries started to export similar products at cheaper prices. This led South Korea to fall into the so-called middle income trap.
This chapter is a further revised and translated version of the author’s article published as Chap. 2 of Lee et al. (2014) written in Korean.
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For further details on the methodology, please refer to Lee (2013).
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Lee, K., Im, B., Han, J. (2017). The National Innovation System (NIS) for the Catch-up and Post-catch-up Stages in South Korea. In: Choi, J., Kwon, Hj., Koo, M. (eds) The Korean Government and Public Policies in a Development Nexus. The Political Economy of the Asia Pacific. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52473-3_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52473-3_5
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