The South Korean Development Experience

In recent years, South Korea's unique changed position from a former aid recipient to emerging donor has attracted global attention, with many developing countries showing a keen interest in how it has achieved such a feat. This volume offers a critical reassessment of the South Korean development experience and its historic transition.

For its part, the South Korean government is eager to promote its past development experience as the distinctive strength of the 'Korean model' of development cooperation. This collection, however, raises some critical questions about emulating, without modification, the twentieth century South Korean authoritarian development experience in the twenty-first century. The South Korean experience will not work as a 'one size fits all' model development due to fundamental changes in the global political economy. South Korea's own double-transition of economic liberalization and democratization attests to such changes. Instead of a model, therefore, the contributors seek an alternative path that would lead to twenty-first century development cooperation.