Neo-liberal Korea and Still Developmentalist Japan: Myth or Reality?

Yong Wook Lee and Sun Young Kwak

Global Economic Review, 2009, vol. 38, issue 3, 277-295

Abstract: In the “varieties of capitalism” debate, scholars have paid considerable attention to the question of whether Korea and Japan have left behind their interventionist political economy for neo-liberal reform. In this paper, we re-examine the scholarly consensus that Korea has become a neo-liberal state, while Japan has not changed much. On the basis of our comparison of the extent of the two countries' neo-liberal reforms using the “business systems framework” developed by Witt, we demonstrate that neo-liberal reforms observed in Korea and Japan are not substantially different enough to warrant the view that the two countries have taken divergent paths of institutional development. With this finding, we call for further empirical study, including the development and use of more qualitative data. We suggest that the future direction research should take on this issue in order to make theoretical contributions to the existing literature on institutional change and continuity in “non-liberal” capitalist countries. We do this by offering some methods in which future researchers could identify necessary and sufficient causes of Korea's and Japan's neo-liberal (or non-neo-liberal) shift.

Keywords: Varieties of capitalism; neo-liberal reform; developmental state; institutional change and continuity; financial liberalization; business systems framework (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/12265080903157334 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:glecrv:v:38:y:2009:i:3:p:277-295

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RGER20

DOI: 10.1080/12265080903157334

Access Statistics for this article

Global Economic Review is currently edited by Kap-Young Jeong and Taeyoon Sung

More articles in Global Economic Review from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().