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Big Business, Strong State: Collusion and Conflict in South Korean Development, 1960-1990, by Eun Mee Kim. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 280 pp.
Since the early 1990s, a plethora of new studies have emerged challenging, or at least problematizing, the role of the so-called developmental state in South Korea (and in East Asia more generally). None of these studies, however, has sought to completely or even mostly deny that the state played a central role in helping to create the basis for rapid economic growth; instead, they have generally attempted to provide a more nuanced and dynamic understanding of the relationship between state and capital (or, more specifically, between the state and chaebol). Eun Mee Kim's Big Business, Strong State: Collusion and Conflict in South Korean Development, 1960-1990, falls squarely into this new mode of analysis. Kim, in fact, is quite clear on this point: as she puts it, `A central assumption in the analysis of the state and the chaebol in . . . [my] book is that these institutions changed in their internal structure and in the relations between the two institutions as economic development proceeded" (p. 4). To her credit, Kim is also interested in showing how the interplay of the state and the chaebol fit into the "broader context of geopolitics and international economy" (p. 5). In this regard, Kim's objective is to show not only how external factors shaped South Korea's development but how the state and capital in South Korea took advantage of the structural obstacles presented by "international actors and contexts" (p. 8). In short, Kim wants to provide a comprehensive, yet carefully balanced reinterpretation of capitalist development in South Korea. To a significant degree, the author carries through on her promise, although Kim does far less than she could (or should) have done.
Big Business, Strong State begins with a discussion of the two main institutions of rapid development in South Korea: the state and the chaebol (in chapters 2 and 3 respectively). While Kim breaks little or no theoretical ground in either of these two chapters, she does provide a very useful analysis of the developmental state. In chapter 2, for example, Kim notes that we should think of the developmental state as...