Reforming Korea's Industrial Conglomerates - by Edward Graham (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

When what was to become the Asian financial crisis of 1997 broke out in Thailand, few analysts predicted that this crisis would spread to South Korea. Korea, after all, had risen from poverty to become one of the "Asian miracle economies". However, the crisis did not spare Korea, and the Korean government was forced to negotiate a bailout from the International Monetary Fund in late 1997. In 1998, the Korean economy went into the deepest recession recorded in that country since the Korean War. Many of the underlying problems were homegrown. Huge amounts of debt had been amassed by Korea's large industrial conglomerates (the chaebol), and often the funds had been invested in undertakings that were not earning satisfactory rates of return. By the end of 1998, a number of smaller conglomerates had failed and one of the top five (Daewoo) was in serious trouble and eventually would fail.

In this study, author Edward M. Graham examines how this situation arose, tracing its roots to the aggressive industrial policy begun by Korean strongman president Park Chung-hee during the late 1960s. Graham notes that a major failing of Korea during the "miracle-economy" years was that the financial sector in Korea remained underdeveloped and thus never was able to develop a counterweight to the economic and political power that, over time, the chaebol acquired. The crisis of 1997 can be seen as the culminating event of that asymmetry that was created by Korean industrial policy, i.e., very powerful industrial groups that operated without the countervailing power of financial institutions. Graham then looks at the efforts at reform since 1997, including reform of the financial sector and the chaebol themselves. He concludes that, while much progress has been made, the reform has been uneven and is far from complete.

About the Author

Edward M. Graham (1944-2007) was a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute from 1990 to 2007. He also taught concurrently as adjunct professor at Columbia University in New York. Previously he was an economist at the US Treasury and taught full-time in the business schools of several US universities (MIT, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Duke University, among others). While serving at the Treasury, he was seconded for two years to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris. He also served as visiting or adjunct faculty at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville; Stanford University (Washington Program); The Johns Hopkins University; Seoul National University; Harvard University (John F. Kennedy School of Government); INSEAD (European Institute of Administration, Fontainebleau, France); and the University of Paris I (Pantheon/La Sorbonne). His research interests have included foreign direct investment, international competition policy, and the industrial organization of major Asian economies.