Sung-Hee Jwa
Sung-Hee Jwa holds a doctorate in economics from UCLA. He is now serving as Chairman of President Park Chung Hee Memorial Foundation where he conducts among others the researches on thought and achievement of the late President Park Chung Hee who led the Korean Economic Miracle. He had worked for a while as an economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in USA. He then had worked for Korea Development Institute as senior economist, and had served as President of Korea Economic Research Institute (KERI) and also as President of Gyeonggi Research Institute (GRI) which is the Korea’s largest provincial research think tank. His areas of specialty are Development Economics, Corporate Economy, Industrial Policy, New-Institutional Economics, and Korean Economy. He has also taught Korean Economy and Development Economics courses on and off over the past decades as an adjunct, visiting or chair professor at various universities such as Seoul National University, KDI Graduate School of Public Policy and Yeungnam University. He has been convinced all the while through his extensive experiences of development policy oriented researches that the mainstream market-centric economics is hard to convincingly explain the universal phenomenon of capitalist economic development as well as the experience of rapid growth in North East Asia, including the Korean Miracle. In this perspective, he recently published two books consolidating alternative ideas developed so far, A General Theory of Economic Development: Towards a Capitalist Manifesto (Edward Elgar, 2017), and The Rise and Fall of Korea’s Economic Development: Lessons for Developing and Developed Economies (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2017) as application of the General Theory. He is now continuing on the journey to deepen the theory of the capitalist economic development to be more ‘realistic discipline’.
Papers Published in World Economics:
Resurrecting Industrial Policy as Development Policy based on Korean Experiences
The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the key economic policy paradigm of the Park Chung-hee administration in Korea was based on a ‘heavy-chemical industrialisation policy’, not ‘export-led growth policy’ as insisted by mainstream economics academia. It also aims to suggest a new theory of industrial policy based on both the General Theory of Economic Development and Korea’s experiences of successful industrial policies. A pro-market industrial policy is a prerequisite for a country’s economic leap forward, and this is evident in Korea’s experiences of successful industrial policies. It is suggested that the market, the corporation and the government need to complement each other in order to contribute to a leapfrogging economic development, and the government should carry out ‘industrial policies by promoting the corporate growth through the principle of economic discrimination based on reward and penalty’, thereby reinforcing the market’s discrimination function. In Korea’s experience, the economies based on the principle of economic discrimination achieved success while those based on egalitarianism and the ideology of economic democratisation ended in failure or achieved only minor success. Therefore, the presented theory of industrial policy based on the principle of economic discrimination advocated by the General Theory of Economic Development is consistent with Korea’s past experiences with industrial policies.
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