Lessons from the Social Policy and Development of South Korea: An Interrogation

This chapter is not about the social policies of South Korea. Rather, it is an attempt at interrogating the South Korean experience with social policy with the view of distilling some lessons for developing countries. The perspective is obviously developmentalist in the sense that it is concerned with the role of social policy in development trajectories such as that traversed by South Korea during the last half-century or so. The chapter does, of course, touch upon other issues of social policy in developing countries, hopefully in a way that does not suggest a subordinate status for those concerns. It is concerned not only with the state’s policies pursued consciously, but also with those pursued unconsciously albeit with consequential social and developmental outcomes. It thus looks at the effects of both omissions and commissions in policy. All this may account for the tentative and speculative nature of the analysis.