Südkorea und Rußland: Wie man Wohlstand erarbeitet oder verspielt

At the beginning or even in the middle of the 20th century, a comparison between rising Czarist Russia or, later, the mighty Soviet Union emerging victorious from World War II and poor Korea would have looked absurd. At the end of the 20th century, however, the South Korean and Russian economies are about equal in size according to purchase- power corrected GDP. South Korean per capita incomes are in between three and four times as high as Russian incomes. Of course, the difference in success of both countries is largely due to the communist experiment in Russia. The divergent economic performance of both countries is all the more astonishing because both countries should have benefited from background conditions generally believed to promote growth: advantages of backwardness, massive investment and strong human capital formation. Moreover, both societies were quite similar in regime characteristics, i.e., they were characterized by autocracy and militarization of society. There are, however, strong differences concerning property rights, the degree of centralization of economic decision- making, capabilities to exploit knowledge and to innovate, economic freedom, urban bias and export orientation. These differences explain the divergent economic performance of both countries. The Soviet heritage of insecure property rights and high transaction costs is unlikely to be overcome soon. Russia’s rich endowment with natural resources seems to induce distributional conflict instead of contributing to institutional and economic development.