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Choeng Wa Dae has given us the second in a series of articles that aim to encourage public debate on closing the income gap. Titled "The Myth of Compressed Growth Has Ended," it blames the rapid growth of the Park Chung-hee era for wealth disparity now. A few days ago, the first article fanned class conflict by likening Korea to a ¡°casino economy¡± where winner takes all; now the presidential office is distorting historical facts.
The unbalanced growth strategy in the Park Chung-hee era, the piece says, is the "historic root of the worsening income gap." Because the ¡°miracle on the Han River¡± was achieved on the strength of unbalanced growth, it ¡°collapsed miserably in the face of the Asian financial crisis like the Seongsu Bridge in Seoul."
It is correct that the Park-era economic development plan pursued a strategy of "unbalanced growth¡±: the country could hardly afford to develop all sectors at the same time, so it nurtured leading industries first through concentrated investment before their effects spread over to the peripheries. It is also true that this resulted in a widening disparity among industries and businesses. But from there to blaming it for the current plight of the underprivileged is a huge leap of logic.
"Korea¡¯s economic growth since the 1960s has been characterized not only by quantitative growth but also by spreading the benefits of growth to low-income brackets by improving distribution, diminishing poverty and reducing unemployment," the administration's own economic guru, the former chief presidential policy advisor Lee Joung-woo, said in a thesis titled "Democracy, Growth and Distribution" a few years ago.
Academics generally agree that income distribution steadily improved since the 1970s. By 1996, just before the financial crisis, it was nearly as good as that of the Netherlands, a model European welfare state. That is why even Lee observed, "It's not surprising that South Korea has been cited as an excellent example of an economic miracle among Northeast Asian countries."
But since the 1997 financial crisis, Korea's income distribution has deteriorated. Under this administration, the income ratio, measured by dividing the income of the upper 20 percent urban workers by that of the bottom 20 percent, continued to get worse, from 5.22 in 2003 to 5.41 in 2004 and to 5.43 in 2005. That should give the authorities pause, surely, to ask themselves what they did wrong. But no: even as it purports to launch itself in full flight into the problem, all this administration can do is distort history to shift the blame to the government of three to four decades ago.
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