Is Park Chung Hee a Successful Economic Leader?

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Similar opinions are prevailing among oversea scholars. A number of foreign scholars assert that President Park’s strategy to develop economy is so brilliant that calling Korean development experience as “Park Chung Hee Syndrom” or “Miracle.” Some foreign scholars actually wanted to benchmark President Park’s plans in order to apply similar strategies to their own country. Luis Mah, the member of Centre of African and Development Studies, strongly agreed with the strategy to end a vicious circle of underdevelopment in Africa. Socialization of private risk and government-let economic development are inevitable to make Africa prosper. Alice Amsden, a political economy professor at MIT, also accorded with the opinion that Korea could turn from underdeveloped agriculture nation to industrial nation under President Park’s strong plans. His reputation for being a successful economic leader is pretty common domestically and internationally.

However, there is a new rising question that ‘Is Park Chung Hee a successful economic leader?’ They argue that even during his incumbency, there was economic recession due to currency conversion reform, which paralyzed financial market. Also, drastic and compulsory development in HCI actually caused economic crisis worse than the one in 1997. I am very interested in this new idea and make a profound study in this subject.

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Reference

Soong hoom Kil and Chung-in Moon (eds.), Understanding Korean Politics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001)

Woo Jin Kang, “Policies and Politics: Democratic Performance and Park Chung-hee: Nostalgia in Korean Democracy,” Asian Perspective, 40:1 (2016), pp. 51-78

Wonhyuk Lim, “Lesson from the Korean Development Experience”, Korea-World Bank High Level Conference on Post-Crisis Growth and Development(2010)

Luis Mah, “Lessons from Korea to Africa: Leaders, Politics and Developmental States”, the 4th European Conference on African Studies in Uppsala(2011)

김정강, “한반도에 근대국가 창출한 역사의 위인”, 한국논단 89권 0호(1997)

강우진, “박정희 신드롬과 한국의 민주주의: 네 가지 쟁점을 중심으로”, 한국과국제정치 29권 2호(2013) pp. 73-105