Research On Korea's Evolution Of Economic Growth And Social Order Transition

In the twentieth century, human society has undergone tremendous change, which not only reflected in the establishment of the new world political and economic order but also reflected in many backward countries which started a goal of catching up developed countries. People of developing countries not only want to achieve the material living standards of developed countries, but also want to live with dignity. "Democracy" and "market" are considered as the "label" of advanced countries, and the label is considered the only way leading to the dreaming world. However, only a few countries have been succeeded in studying and imitating, most people of developing countries found that democracy and market didn't work well in their countries. Democracy and market did not bring with stability and development, but bring with more chaos and decline. In the process of learning and imitation of democracy and market, people ignored the important role of social conditions. At the same time, people ignore that democracy and market have developed over one century in the developed countries. People in developing countries want to build Rome in one day, which is lack of mature institutions to support.South Korea's successful transition after rapid economic growth is a typical case. After a decade of turmoil, Park Chung Hee's authoritarian government took control of government. In a short time, the authoritarian government stabilized the social order and created a miracle of rapid economic growth. High speed economic growth accumulated impetus in the political and economic system, and finally promoted the transition of social order. Economic growth and social order transition present a significant interact relationship in post-war history of South Korea. Understanding the process of such interaction evolution will help to understand the reason of rapid economic growth and the transition power of economic and political system.The basic framework of this article will be the "social order transition theory (RHH model)" which proposed by North, Wallis and Weingast in 2006. According to the model, the post-war development process of South Korea will be divided into three stages, limited access order, transition from limited order to open acess order and open access order. At the same time, the paper will describe and analyze the different interactions showed by political and economic system at different stages of development.The evolution of political system and economic system is the result of many interest groups'interaction; force formed by many interest groups in the multi-game finally decided the direction of the social order transition. In the process of South Korea's social order transition, the government and the chaebol played the core role of political system and economic system separately, the interaction between them determined the pace and direction of South Korea's social order transiton. Therefore, on the basis of RHH model, this article increased the investigation to the capacity of South Korea's goverment. State capacity is a different concept from the fome of political system, authoritarian government is not a synonymous of "strong government" and democratic government is not "weak government" either. In the process of social order transiton, many countries confused the state capacity and fome of political system. As a result, many transiton countries weakened national capacity in the process of political and economic structural reform, which led to the failure. This article will use the theory of state capacity to analyze the important role of government in the process of social order transition.Economic growth and democratization are inextricably linked, and demoratization always means decline of the concentration of government power. Then the relationship between economic growth and the decline of the concentiantion of government power will be an interesting question. The hypothesis of inverted "U-shaped" change of the concentration of government power with economic growth will be proposed in this paper.