S Korea

choi

South Korea’s economy |  What Do You Do When You Reach the Top?  To outsiders, South Korea’s heroic economic ascent is a template for success. But now it has almost caught up with the developed world it must change its approach. Economist, Nov 12, 2011.
http://www.economist.com/node/21538104

"In 1960, in the aftermath of a devastating war, the exhausted south was one of the poorest countries in the world, with an income per head on a par with the poorest parts of Africa. By the end of 2011 it will be richer than the European Union average, with a gross domestic product per person of $31,750, calculated on a basis of purchasing-power parity (PPP), compared with $31,550 for the EU.

"For most poor countries, South Korea is a model of growth, a better exemplar than China, which is too vast to copy, and better, too, than Taiwan, Singapore or Hong Kong. All three are richer than Korea but all are, in different ways, exceptions: Singapore and Hong Kong are city states, while Taiwan’s disputed sovereignty makes it sui generis.

"When a country or a company is playing catch-up it can look at what others are doing and do it better. This Korea has done well. Hyundai has outcompeted Toyota in the market for reliable, efficient, cheap cars. Korea’s shipyards have beaten everyone through economies of scale.

"The Korean model had four distinctive features: a Stakhanovite workforce; powerful conglomerates; relatively weak smaller firms; and high social cohesion. All these are either coming under strain, or in need of reassessment, or both. South Koreans lay great store by education and hard work. They put in 2,200 hours of work a year, half as much again as the Dutch or Germans.  Their reaction to the 2008 slump was to work harder still. During the 2009-10 recovery, reckons Richard Freeman of Harvard University, Korea had the second-largest increase in hours worked in manufacturing, after Taiwan.

"An unusually large part of the spending that makes Korean education so good is private, not public. The government spends just under 5% of GDP on education, slightly below the rich-country average. Families add an extra 2.8% of GDP on top of that, easily the highest rate in the OECD. At universities, family spending [collectively] is three times that of the state. And families spend an estimated 8% of their household budgets on after-hours programmes for each child, an investment which explains the effort mothers put into making sure it pays off. If you have three children, their after-school activities alone could swallow up a quarter of the household budget.

"Korea’s shipyards have just started work on a new class of container ships called the triple E-class which are easily the largest container ships ever built

"Korea’s large companies employ slightly less than a quarter of the workforce and produce more than half the country’s output. Chaebol-alikes exist round the world, from Carlos Slim’s Group Carso in Mexico to Lee Ka-shing’s holdings in Hong Kong. The surviving chaebol have proved resilient. During the 1997-98 crisis, some chaebol’s debt-to-equity ratios soared to over 500%; half of them went bust and conglomerates were widely seen as a drag on the economy. Now, those that came through the time of trial have returned to profitability and respectable debt ratios

"except in some internet businesses and computer gaming, South Korea has few start-ups * * * Koreans perceive fewer opportunities for entrepreneurship than any of their peers in rich countries except Japan, according to an annual survey by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, set up by the London Business School and Babson College, Massachusetts. * * * Weak small firms

"And then there is the ever-present imponderable: the possible need, at some point, to finance the horrendous costs of reunification with destitute North Korea when that state collapses. That would make the vast expense of unification in Germany pale into insignificance.

Note:
(a) Cheonggyecheon (stream)  淸溪川
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheonggyecheon
(b) The "busk" in "Busking fills the air" is an intransitive verb that means
" ( Brit ) to make money by singing, dancing, acting, etc, in public places, as in front of theatre queues"  
Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition. HarperCollins 2009.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/busk
(c) S Korean currency won, Japanese yen (pronounced actually as "en" in Japan but foreigners added "y" similar to Iwo Jima 硫黄島, officially Iōtō without "w") and China's yuan shares an identical Chinese character.
(d) The article says, "Some of the recovery is the result of Korea’s happy dependence on China: it exports more capital goods to China relative to the size of its economy than anyone else, even Germany. But this is only part of the explanation (which is just as well given China’s slowdown)."

Well, despite the controversy (some Taiwanese are worried overdependence on China trade, but I am a free trader), Taiwan indeed do better than S Korea in export to US, China or possibly any other nations.
(i) Taiwan--Export: $273.8 billion (2010 est.); partners: China 28.1%, Hong Kong 13.8%, US 11.5%, Japan 6.6%, Singapore 4.4% (2010 est.)
(ii) S Korea--Exports: $464.3 billion (2010 est.); partners: China 27.9%, US 10.2%, Japan 5.8% (2010)
CIIA World Factbook (2011)

S Korea does not rely on Hong Kong as much as Taiwan, which needs it as a fig leaf as well as geographical closeness.

(e) The article comments, "If the Korean economy goes on growing at 4.5% a year and America’s at 2.5%, Korea would overtake America (in PPP terms) only a few years later."

I am not so sure. S Korea has not overtaken Taiwan yet in this aspect. On the other hand, Taiwan itself might surpass US by the same criterion. But I will not wager on it, with Japan in mind. 前車覆,後車誡。――《漢書·賈誼傳》
(f) Stakhanovite (n; translation of Russian stakhanovets, from Alexei G. Stakhanov †1977 Russian miner; First Known Use: 1935):
"a Soviet industrial worker awarded recognition and special privileges for output beyond production norms
(g) The "store" in the sentence "South Koreans lay great store by education and hard work" is a noun that means
"VALUE, IMPORTANCE <set great store by a partner's opinion>"
(h) league table
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_table

The term is not found in www.m-w.com, presumably it is not American. I have not seen it before.
(i) The article concludes by saying Korea "developed movable metal type two centuries before Gutenberg."

(A) movable type
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type

Quote:

"The world's first known movable-type system for printing was created in China around 1040 AD by Bi Sheng (990–1051) during the Song Dynasty; then the first metal movable-type system for printing was made in Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty (around 1230) 高麗王朝 [918-1392]. This led to the printing of the Jikji in 1377—today the oldest extant movable metal print book. The diffusion of both movable-type systems was, however, limited: They were expensive, and required an enormous amount of labour involved in manipulating the thousands of ceramic tablets, or in the case of Korea, metal tablets.

"Around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press

(B) Jikji
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jikji
(Jikji is the abbreviated title of a Korean Buddhist document, whose title can be translated "Anthology of Great Buddhist Priests' Zen Teachings"; full title of the document is 白雲和尙抄錄佛祖直指心體要節, whose revised Romanization is Baegun hwasang chorok buljo jikji simche yojeol)

Apparently Jikji corresponds to 直指.
(C) Bi Sheng
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi_Sheng
(畢昇; 990–1051 AD; was the inventor of the first known movable type technology. Bi Sheng's system was made of Chinese porcelain and was invented between 1041 and 1048 in China)

I am surprised to learn it. Nobody in Taiwan has heard of him or his fete.