>As John Lie argues in _Han Unbound_, the ROK's quick and radical land reform
>allowed millions of small farmers, in what was one of the world's poorest
>nations c. 1953, to subsist decently while the country was being
>industrialized by the state planners, who were largely drawn from the
>liquidated landlord class. The land reform allowed for a relatively easy
>way of slowly converting farmers into urban workers over three decades. All
>of this was planned by bureaucrats, who intentionally avoided the
>application of normal "market" forces.
And, the war caused the destruction of the rural ruling class, meaning there was no significant obstacle to that land reform (very much unlike Latin America), and neither was there an industrial bourgeoisie. The state had a free hand to plan as it liked. It wasn't pretty, but it also had absolutely nothing to do with Hayekian market signals - quite the contrary, prices were controlled, finance was repressed, and investment guided by bureaucrats.
Doug