The Developmental States of South Korea and Taiwan: Core Features and Divergent Trajectories

This paper makes two arguments concerning the current developmental state literature in general and the cases of South Korea and Taiwan in particular. First, it contends that current efforts to advance the developmental state literature has often ignored the geopolitical and social structural contexts of its emergence, but one-sidedly analyzed its institutional features and applied it as an abstract model. This study re-examines the cases of the pre- mid-1980s South Korea and Taiwan and argues that not only have their geopolitical contexts facilitated the pursuit of developmental strategies, divergencies in social structural conditions led them to mobilize different policy tools with dissimilar distributive outcomes. Second, this paper contends that the developmental state institutions should not be examined as static entities. They may reconfigure and navigate new policy instruments or dissolve in the face of global and national changes, which in South Korea and Taiwan include the deepening of globalization, China’s rise, and democratization. Yet, again, how they adapt depends in part on the geopolitical contexts and social structural conditions. That Taiwan has faced more complex challenges from China’s rise and South Korea has a more vigorous labor movement have triggered divergent trajectories. This point will be demonstrated in part through an examination of the changes in the state institutions themselves and in part through two case studies, including how the two societies tackled COVID-19 and the performance of their top R&D companies. In so doing, this paper also contributes to the debates on the demise of East Asian developmental state.