Tell me again that Korea is not a corporate oligarchy punishing consumer and SMEs to reward mega-exporters? In the end, the back-and-forth was too congenial, allowing too many of the speakers to spin and duck hard issues.
Last year I thought the questioners pushed Korean officials a lot harder. It was disappointing this time, maybe because the officialdom level was higher this time. Who wants to publicly challenge the finance minister? Last year was indirectly revealing for the way Korean officials bobbed-and-weaved to avoid answering hard questions about capital controls. This signaled pretty clearly that they were in fact competitively devaluing the won.
This year, no one really tried much. I pushed a bit. The right answer is yes. I have written about this before here and here , and variants of this question were asked last year too. But no one answered it really.
In fact, not one Korean speaker even used the word chaebol the whole day, which left me bemused and disappointed. The most courageous question came from a Korean who asked a panel point-blank if Korea had the creativity and openness to foreigners necessary to really grasp globalization.
This is a major issue; I argued last year that cultural hesitation, not technical or ideological barriers, is the real hurdle to the internationalization of the won. Yet none of the Korean panelists even blinked.
A fog of silly disconfirmations about the creation of Hanguel or the supposed global popularity of K-pop and Korean food were thrown out to suggest Korean is a creative open economy.
At that point I overheard the Economist guys talking about how the same issues come up year and again regarding international finance and Korea, but nothing seems to happen. The ideas in this post and the next expand on the arguments made in my recent JoongAng Daily op-ed. Every year the Economist runs a series of conferences on the political economy of Asia. If you are in this part of the world, you should probably go if you can. And it is a good reminder that when it comes to the real world and stuff that matters ie, money , professors scarcely matter.
Korea is better defined as small and corporatist, with latter deployed to overcome the former. Korea is sharply divided economy with tight but large conglomerate bloc at the top the chaebol overawing the rest of the economy. These firms get such generous access to the state, and its budget and moral approval, that Korea, Inc.
Industrial policy is a reflex here ; I see it all the time. Every time I ask my students about some change in the Korean economy, their first response is to say the government should do this or that about it. I almost never get liberals in my classes, although to be fair, when I get Japanese and Chinese students, they talk the same way.
Korean academics at conferences here are similar. I almost never hear the run-of-the-mill liberal notion that the economy should simply evolve as it will, without direction from the state. When I tell my students that the American car industry deserves to take a beating for making poor vehicles, they look bewildered.
The jeonse system is one of the most regressive, upwardly redistributive, oligarchy-reinforcing, middle class-crushing elements of the Korean economy. And indeed you could see the mercantilist reflex all over the conference, even though no one wanted to say it. When the issue of exchange rates came up, the same division as last year of foreigners vs.
Koreans arose. That pegging like this is in fact exchange rate manipulation as the Japanese FinMin said last week was simply not admitted. Part two of this post is here. Like this: Like Loading Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
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