For most poor countries, South Korea is a model of growth, a better exemplar than China, which is too vast to copy, and better, too, than Taiwan, Singapore or Hong Kong. All three are richer than Korea but all are, in different ways, exceptions: Singapore and Hong Kong are city states, while Taiwan's disputed sovereignty makes it sui generis.
South Korea has not merely grown fast. It has combined growth with democracy. Though its spurt began under a military dictator, Park Chung-hee, for the past 25 years the country has had a vibrant parliamentary system. Korea scores the same as Japan in the democracy tally kept by Freedom House, a think-tank in Washington, DC. No other Asian country does as well. At the same time Korea has combined growth with equity. Between 1980 and 1997, its Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, fell from 0.33 to an exceptionally low 0.28, before rising back up during the 1997-98 Asian crisis. In 2010, the level was 0.31, a bit worse than Scandinavian countries, a bit better than Canada.