South Korean Developmental Neoliberalism Model： A Case Study of the U.S.- Korea FTA

After WWII, the economic miracle in East Asia has given rise to a great theoretical debate of the economic transformation in this region. One of the famous theoretical responses to the transformation of Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs) in East Asia is “Developmental State Theory” established by Chalmers Johnson. However, developmental state theory has encountered several challenges especially after Asian Financial Crisis in 1997. South Korea was one of the Asian countries which suffered from the big disaster and some have criticized it was owing to the active and direct state intervention, strong economic and industrial policies, and the chaebol-oriented crony capitalism that induced this economic meltdown. Furthermore, the financial crisis served as the wake up call to Korea to generate substantial economic gains; therefore, the state started to shift its policy from tradition focus on mercantilism to a neoliberalism country through its trade-liberalized Free Trade Agreement (FTA) policy. This research mainly focuses on the negotiation process of the KORUS FTA which is one of the influential FTAs of Korea. After outlining the background of the KORUS FTA, this research seeks to analyzine two following research questions: first, after globalization and Asian Financial Crisis, did Korea totally transform its economic ideology from developmentalism to neoliberalism? Or actually it turned to be the “developmental neoliberalism” state which remained its characteristic of developmentalism but also combined with the conception of neoliberalism? Second, if the characteristic of developmentalism still remains, what’s the role of state, the reaction between state and the chaebols and the society when facing numerous obstacles against KORUS FTA? By analyzing these two research questions, this study seeks to have a better understanding of the transformed Korea.