DISCUSSION PAPER 10/2018
Lucky Goldstar and the Rockets What worked in South Korea?
Greg Mills
Strengthening Africa’s economic performance Lucky Goldstar and the Rockets What worked in South Korea?
Contents
Executive Summary ...... 3 Introduction ...... 4 From Destruction to Construction ...... 4 South Korea–Africa Ties ...... 5 Innovation and Evolution ...... 7 Conclusion: Authoritarianism as a Chimera? ...... 9 Endnotes ...... 12
About the Authors Published in October 2018 by Dr Greg Mills heads the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation, estab- The Brenthurst Foundation lished in 2005 by the Oppenheimer family to strengthen African economic performance. He holds degrees from the Universities of Cape Town and Lancaster, and was the National Director of the SA Institute of International The Brenthurst Foundation Affairs from 1996 to 2005. He has directed numerous reform projects in more (Pty) Limited than a dozen African governments (including in 2017 for example with the PO Box 61631, Johannesburg 2000, governments of Ghana, Lagos State, the five states of SE Nigeria, Lesotho South Africa and Mozambique), sat on the Danish Africa Commission and on the African Tel +27–(0)11 274–2096 Development Bank’s high-level panel on fragile states, and has served four deployments to Afghanistan with NATO. A member of the advisory board of Fax +27–(0)11 274–2097 the Royal United Services Institute, he is the author, inter alia, of the best- www.thebrenthurstfoundation.org selling books Why Africa Is Poor, Africa’s Third Liberation (with Jeffrey Herbst), and most recently, together with the chairman of the Foundation, President All rights reserved. The material Olusegun Obasanjo, Dr Herbst and Major-General Dickie Davis, Making Africa in this publication may not be Work: A Handbook for Economic Success. He is currently working on a book- reproduced, stored, or transmitted length study entitled Making Democracy Work due out at the start of 2019. without the prior permission of the publisher. Short extracts may be quoted, provided the source is fully acknowledged.
Layout and design by Sheaf Publishing, Benoni. LUCKY GOLDSTAR AND THE ROCKETS
Executive Summary
From a per capita income of just US$80 in 1962, three times poorer at the time than North Korea, from 1965 to 1990, South Korea achieved an average growth of 9.9 per cent, the highest in the world. Today its per capita income is US$30 000, and a number of its companies are global market leaders. A focus on early authoritari- anism under President Park Chung-hee as the reason for Korea’s rapid growth and transformation obscures the complex myriad programmes and tough deliberate choices made in the process. This involved, at its heart, the strategic re-orientation from protectionism to export-led growth and the rapid refocusing of society on competitiveness. Looking back, over nearly 60 years later, this seems logical and, following Southeast Asia’s subsequent development path, passé even. At the time it was revolutionary.
BRENTHURST DISCUSSION PAPER 10/2018 3 LUCKY GOLDSTAR AND THE ROCKETS
Introduction having a strongman; indeed, Park’s style of rule threatened and ultimately undercut his success. ‘Get on with it’ best summarises the thinking of General Park Chung-hee, the boss and president of South Korea for 18 years.1 Or as he put it more politely, ‘We need wordless deeds and ambitious construction programmes’.2 While he was democratically elected five times, Park was no democrat. His instinct and focus were elsewhere. He oversaw a rapid economic take-off, driven by an export-led industrialisation strat- egy. From 1965 to 1990, the country achieved an average growth of 9.9 per cent, the highest in the The three years of the Korean War saw four million casualties world, increasing its annual exports more than and the destruction of 70 per cent of infrastructure. 5 000 times. In the process, along with the other Asian ‘Tigers’ (Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore), There was much more to it than perspiration and it altered perceptions and expectations of develop- militarism. With a belief in Shin-Sang-Pil-bul (‘Never ment worldwide. fail to reward a merit’), Park’s ideology centred on Figure 1: National income as a share of what Sung Hee Jwa, the head of the Park Chung global income (per capita) Hee Foundation, describes as ‘economic discrimi- nation’, as opposed to ‘egalitarianism’.4 Economic