The Korean state strategically intervened in the economy through planning rationales, industrial targeting, and the mobilization and selective allocation of resources in strategic sectors. In other words, the state virtually dictated the nature and direction of market forces in order to achieve its objectives by effectively utilizing the reservoir of policy instruments available to it. The state was able to govern market forces effectively because of its unique organizational features. While executive dominance ensured a centralized decision-making structure, the relative autonomy of the state and its powerful bureaucrats facilitated the formulation of efficient and consistent economic policies and their implementation
The claims of developmental statism are by and large predicated on a dichotomy of state and society, where the state is assumed to regularly dominate civil society. Some have criticized this binary distinction as an artificial analytical construct, arguing that state and society are always already interpenetrated through a myriad of formal and informal networks and that a country’s economic performance depends on the nature of these networks (Evans, 1995; Lee, 1992). In the Korean case, state-society networks have been based on a vertical hierarchy that enabled the state to dictate the form of social organization. But such a hierarchy has been complemented by horizontal ties formed through formal networks such as various councils and informal networks such as schools and families. Korea’s economic success can be ascribed to this rather unique state-society arrangement