North Korea

[TRox51 at aol.com]

Dennis, send me your address & I'll post to you an article on Pohang I wrote about 10 years ago for the Japanese magazine AMPO. Pohang Iron & Steel was almost entirely financed by Japanese corporations and based exclusively on Japanese technology. The 1965 SKorea-Japan Normalization Treaty (forced on Seoul by the US) was designed to bring Japanese capital into SKorea. It came, at first, in the form of wartime indemnities - $800 million worth, which was a lot of money at the time. Yes, they used the state, but Japan played a key role in the initial stages of export-led industrialization. So much so that Park Chung Hee (himself trained in the Japanese military as was the long-time president of Pohang) had to pass laws to remove Japanese signs from many businesses. 
Tim Shorrock

On Mon, 24 Apr 2000 TRox51 at aol.com wrote:


> In regards to NK economic development (or lack thereof), its interesting
> to note that the CIA put out a report in the early '70s that NK was
> ahead of SK in nearly every economic indicator. It was after the
> mid-1970s, when Japanese corporations and banks began pouring huge
> amounts of capital and technology into the south, that SK began to
> surpass NK.

Japanese direct investment into South Korea has been pretty limited;
Korean firms had to rent Japanese technology out of their export-earnings.
South Korea got rich thanks to a state-directed petrochemicals and
heavy industrial push in the 1970s -- resulting in the Pohang Iron & Steel
Co., the state-owned and highly profitable steelmaker. You might say
that the South Koreans turned the North's main weapon -- the power of the 
state -- to their own advantage. In 1998, the EU countries actually
invested more in Korea than Japan, but the relative amounts have been
pretty small -- nothing like the tidal wave that financed Singapore.

-- Dennis