Chapter 5: South Korea in the early days of its takeoff

‘What would have been the conclusion of an institutional diagnostic of the development potential of South Korea conducted in the mid- or late-1970s, at a time when the country was still a low-income country, at roughly the same income level as the case studies in the IDP project?’

In the 1960s or 1970s there were no institutional or governance indicators comparable to those existing in international databases for the last few decades, no surveys were run about how people felt about the institutional context of economic development, and thus no thematic study could have been launched based on the information gathered from such surveys. Yet the abundant literature that exists on Korea’s development permits us to partly fill in the holes and to formulate a diagnostic that is approximately comparable to those in the IDP project.