Dependence Revolution But South Korea poses
a serious challenge to the dependence revolution
models. Here is a poor country that became tied in
with the international economy: It was strongly dependent
in international relations—it was a Japanese
colony until 1945 and thereafter wholly dependent
on maintaining the goodwill of the United
States for defense against invasion by North Korea.
It received a large part of its national budget in the
form of U.S. aid in the 1950s and both exported and
imported a great deal from developed countries, especially
the United States and Japan. The shape of
the nation’s development was thus “conditioned”
in large part by export opportunities to developed
countries, and dependence theory would predict
that retarded development opportunities should result.
Yet South Korea today is an OECD member
and is widely considered a candidate for developed-country
status (its income is comparable to
that of Greece and Portugal). Of course, dependence
theorists could and do claim that South Korea
is an exception because of the magnitude of aid it
received and the self-interests of the advanced
countries in seeing its full successful development
because of its role as a bulwark against communism.
And the Korean government pursued some
particular policies that the dependence school
would by and large applaud, including carrying
out an extremely active industrial upgrading policy,
sharply limiting the role of multinational corporations
and deliberately establishing indigenous industries
as an alternative, and using debt rather
than direct foreign equity investment to finance extraordinary
levels of investment. South Korea also
implemented one of the most ambitious land reform
programs in the developing world and placed
strong emphasis on primary rather than university
education, two policies of exceptional importance.
But this does not explain how South Korea was able
to adopt such policies to break out of dependence
in the first place. And when too many exceptions
start to be made in any theory, it usually indicates
that the theory doesn’t reflect the whole truth.