After painful reform and restructuring of post-1997 financial crisis, many scholars equated South Korea’s ‘post-developmental state’ with neo-liberal state. However, in doing so, they ignored South Korea’s lasting legacy of interventionist ‘developmental state’ that led nation’s miraculous transformation from a poor agrarian society to a prosperous industrial economy. This article stresses that South Korea indeed tried to adopt some of the policy prescriptions suggested by neo-liberal ideas but moving beyond the dictates of neo-liberalism it also strengthened state capacity to augment non-market mechanisms.
The article argues that South Korea’s post-developmental state moved into two non-market spheres; First, by tilting towards becoming a ‘techno-scientific state’ and second, it attempted to reimaging South Korea by leaning to develop into a ‘Brand state’. Both non-market initiatives moved South Korea ‘beyond neo-liberalism’ and invoked its ‘statist developmental’ past guided by Keynesian economics. South Korea’s reach to incorporate market and non-market dictates has invited terms such as ‘liberal developmentalism’, a hybrid system where state used its enhanced capacity to improve the efficiency of market system.
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