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This study is informed by the theorizing prompted by recent work on state rescaling. I aim to examine the interaction between the top-down and bottom-up rescaling processes that took place in the South Korean developmental state during the late 1960s and early 1970s. I focus on a regionalism that both built a regional scale and influenced the hegemonic crisis of the ruling regime. Specifically, the study illustrates the features of state space that were shaped during the developmental era and the factors that allow state space to be stable and coherent. By dealing with these questions, I provide a possible interpretation of why and how regionalism was a crucial factor in the hegemonic crisis of the 1960s and generated a rescaling of state space. What makes this study significant is not merely the fact that this space is located in East Asia. It could also, more generally, open up an alternative perspective on state rescaling during the early stages of state-led industrialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study reassesses the conventional wisdom surrounding the developmental state of South Korea (hereafter Korea) since the 1997 Korean financial crisis. The conventional wisdom is that, as a result of the continued structural reforms prompted by the crisis, the Korean developmental state, inherently characterised by active or direct state intervention, strong economic and industrial policies, the chaebol-oriented economic policy, and labour exclusion, has finally begun to dissolve in earnest. In this study, we have considered whether that is really the case and also which theoretical implications can be drawn from this consideration. Analysis of the Korean developmental state following the 1997 crisis has indicated that, quite contrary to conventional wisdom, the developmental state has continued to prevail as a core policy framework of the Korean administrations even after the crisis. There is no doubt that the continued structural and market reform after the crisis certainly undermined the Korean developmental state to a certain degree, but that does not mean the beginning of the end of the Korean developmental state at all. For much evidence strongly indicates that the Korean developmental state still remains intact and strong despite the structural reforms, on account of the successive Korean governments’ assiduous and deliberate efforts to maintain and reinforce it. Even after the crisis, the Kim Dae-Jung and post-Kim regimes have hardly abandoned many of their market interventionist policies. Such market interventionist policies, which were routinely practised under the military regime in the 1960s and 1970s, diametrically contravene the argument that the Korean developmental state has begun to dissolve as a result of structural reform after the 1997 crisis. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Korean developmental state persists as usual. All this information, then, suggests that path dependence is in action in the case of the Korean developmental state, and this suggests a further hypothesis that the Korean developmental state is very likely to persist in the future as well, despite increasing globalisation pressure, given the strong path dependence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, the Korean developmental state implemented a series of drastic egalitarian educational policies that were primarily geared toward social integration. While promoting social mobility and educational expansion, they provided the basis of the egalitarian social contract in Korea's educational policymaking for decades. Since the 1990s, however, the Korean state has implemented neoliberal education reforms that led to the rapid dismantling of the egalitarian framework for the country's educational policymaking. These neoliberal reforms were strongly supported by the affluent middle class that prefer elitist education and can afford expensive private education. The general direction of change in Korea's educational policymaking suggests both significant change and continuity in the character of the Korean state and its relations to society since the 1990s. The contemporary Korean state still maintains a highly strategic and activist orientation in adopting and implementing policies although its policies are increasingly neoliberal in content. In doing so, the Korean state is gradually abandoning its broad social base and mobilizational capacity, while increasingly connecting with the upper segments of the middle class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalists and former students of the Asian developmental state maintain that the latter has succumbed to the forces of globalization. They believe that the global knowledge economy involves the thorough integration of the global economy, continuous innovation and networks rather than hierarchies and that these factors are foreign to the operational logic of the developmental state and thus render it obsolete. This article contends that the global economy is not as open as supposed, and that the challenges posed by the knowledge economy, while genuine, tend to be uneven. Focusing on Korea's information technology sector and relying on documentary and interview data, the present article suggests that, while the Korean state no longer relies on its erstwhile finance and regulation strategies, it has continued to articulate development visions and sought to achieve them through deploying public resources to structure the market. Rather than going into eclipse, the Korean developmental state has been reconfigured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dense informal networks between public- and private-sector elites have long been identified as a key institutional feature that had underpinned rapid economic development in many East Asian countries. With the outbreak of the Asian financial crisis in 1997, however, a number of scholars have cast doubt on the long-term efficacy of informal networks, discrediting the East Asian model as crony capitalism. Although these debates renewed our interests in the role of informal networks in East Asia, they fall short of highlighting the real dynamics underlying informal networks. Parachute appointment in Korea - political appointment of ex-politicians and ex-bureaucrats into public and private corporations - is a prime example demonstrating political intervention in the formation and management of informal networks.We argue that the nature of political competition in Korea is a key to understanding the underlying dynamics of informal networks. First, Korean politicians, the president and the ruling party have actively engaged in making and maintaining the networks of parachute appointment. Second, owing to its politicized nature, parachute appointment is neither institutionalized nor stably managed. In the current highly uncertain political and economic situation, both public and private corporations have actively embraced parachute appointment as a means of fortifying external networking with the incoming political leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post-crisis economic reforms in South Korea have been uneven. While financial reform has been thoroughly carried out, corporate restructuring and labor market flexibility have not been successfully implemented to transform the micro-behavior of the chaebol and labor unions. The unevenness of economic reform is attributable to sociopolitical dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the partial analysis of the socio-political impact of the IMF reforms implemented by the government of South Korea in response to the financial crisis of 1997 to 1998. It has been found out that the IMF reforms altered Korea's development path. The study have found out farther that the paradigm shift in Korea's developmental state has been a contrast to the previous arguments which proclaimed the demise of the developmental state.

This article analyses the Kim Dae-jung government's industrial realignment (‘Big Deals’) policy in post-crisis Korea, which offers a valuable insight into the state's role in managing the transition from a developmental state to a free-market economy and into the changing nature of government–business relations. Although Kim was committed to creating a free-market economy in Korea, as the ‘Big Deals’ got under way critics accused him of violating market principles and employing tactics of intervention and coercion used by previous authoritarian regimes. The ‘Big Deals’ experience suggests a further stage in the evolution of the Korean developmental state; the dismantling of state powers and the implementation of neoliberal reforms in the 1990s had led to the emergence of a ‘transformative state’ in which the state acted as ‘senior partner’ rather than ‘commander-in-chief’. The transitional state charged with the task of rebuilding the economy after 1997 regained some of its lost powers and used some familiar methods of achieving its ends. However, it also demonstrated by the nature and scope of its interventions that it was gradually evolving and adapting to meet the changing economic environment. Although Kim's actions prompted allegations from the chaebol and their conservative allies of a return to autocratic economic management by the government, it was clear that the developmental state had not been resurrected. Rather, these criticisms serve to highlight the continuing antagonism in the state–business relationship; neither side had developed new strategies for dealing with each other and their relations were still characterized by mutual mistrust and staunch chaebol resistance to key reforms demanded by the government. Although suspicions of a permanent return to extensive state intervention were unfounded, they nevertheless diminished the prospects for the creation of a cooperative relationship between the state and big business that would be a crucial factor in revitalizing the Korean economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]