cycle of economic and political dependency in the initial stages of South Korea's economic development, despite the negative implications of those findings for political democracy and labor rights. Also, while he diagnoses some of the pernicious effects of business corruption and crony capitalism in the early 90s, he failed to foresee the emerging relationship between those phenomena and South Korea's later economic difficulties.
The South Korean economic miracle can be summarized in a few statistics. The average annual income per capita of a South Korean in 1961 was $82, in 1993 $7,660 (213). Between 1965 and 1990, its average annual growth rate (GNP per capita) was 7.1 percent, one of the highest in the world (1). After enduring the cruelties of Japanese colonialism, the ravages of World War II and the catastrophic effects of the Korean War, South Korea's economic prospects in 1960 appeared at best to be problematical.
Economic Takeoff in the 60s. After his coup d'etat of May 1961, Park argued that "political instability was a major cause of poverty and rampant corruption" and "saw the establishment of an authoritarian regime . . . an important first step in attaining economic development" (36). The government combined a pervasive system of political repression with
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