>Actually if you follow James Fallow's argument, which I think is sound, the
>Koreans really aren't catching up tot he Japanese
>
>a) because the keiretsu model is less effective in a country with a small
>domestic demand base than a larger country like Japan.
>b) because the Japanese own a lot of the potential competition in Korea.
>c) because the Japanese refuse to license to the Koreans lotsa their hot stuff
>in whatever field you should choose to name.
I don't know about (a), but (b) sounds way overstated (FDI in Korea is quite minimal), and (c) only came to be true in the late 1980s. There's a new book out from Routledge - Made In Korea, by Richard Steers - on Hyundai. When I interviewed the author, who's at the University of Oregon biz school, I grilled him on (c), and that's what he told me.
Doug