Mises Daily Friday by Ryan McMaken:
Just as the Japanese economy has long been influenced and even dominated by major government-connected corporate entities known as keiretsu and zaibatsu, Korea has somewhat analogous corporations known as chaebols. The Korean version of “too-big-to-fail,” but far more significant to the overall Korean economy, these entities have been key in executing Korean government policy through “government-chaebol cooperation.”
Hong notes that the rise of government-promoted pop culture in Korea cannot be fully understood outside this context, and in the final chapters of her book, she examines this tradition of corporate-government cooperation by looking at the case of Samsung, LG, and other recently-successful Korean business enterprises that are nonetheless built on government favors and taxation.
Hong writes: “As with many of Korea’s success stories discussed in this book, Samsung’s rise to the world stage is attributable [to] … the direct intervention of the Korean government at crucial stages.”
And lest anyone think that Samsung is just another corporation, Hong reminds us that “Samsung alone generates one-fifth of the country’s GDP.” It’s not hard to see how the Korean state would see Samsung as essentially an adjunct of itself. “What’s good for Samsung is good for Korea” is no doubt a sentiment in the halls of Korean government agencies.
