"Bad Samaritans
By Ha-Joon ChangBloomsbury Press, 288 pages
Ha-Joon Chang’s life is conterminous with his country’s advance from being one of the poorest on Earth—with a 1961 yearly income of $82 per person, less than half the $179 per capital income in Ghana at that time—to the manufacturing powerhouse of today, with a 2004 per capita income of $13,980. South Korea did not get there by following the advice of the Bad Samaritans. Chang’s prologue contains a wonderful account of how post-Korean War trade restrictions and governmental supervision fostered such projects as POSCO (Pohang Iron and Steel Co.), which began life as a state-owned enterprise that was refused support from the World Bank in a country without any iron ore or coking coal and with a prohibition on trade with China. Now privatized, POSCO is the world’s third largest steel company. This was also the period in which Samsung subsidized its infant electronics subsidiaries for over a decade with money made in textiles and sugar refining. Today Samsung dominates flat-panel TVs and cell phones in much of East Asia and the world. "
Please read the (long) review. Another one by dear Kirsten. Very pertinent to the next post... Looks like a great book.
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