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South Korea Business

In: Business and Management

Submitted By vaibhav5599
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Doing Business in South Korea

South Korea has to be classed as one of the world’s great economic success stories. Along with Taiwan, South Korea is the only country which has recorded five consecutive decades of economic growth in excess of 5%. This is an amazing achievement which is the result of careful governmental macro-engineering, sound business practice and sheer hard work from the population at large. Economists feel that, given the lengthy stagflation seen in Japan, that it will not be too long before South Korean levels of prosperity are at a par with Japan.

Both South Korea and Japan are intensely conformist societies (one of the many similarities between the two countries) but they differ in one fundamental thing. When faced with hardship or adversity the Japanese tend to turn inwards and backwards towards the familiar and comfortable whereas the South Koreans are absolute masters of change and rebuild. If things aren’t working, they just change them and they have proved adept at doing this very quickly and very effectively – you only need to look at the contrasting reactions to the crisis that hit Asia in the 1990’s. Japan is, arguably, still recovering while South Korea has long been in rude health.

South Korea has also re-invented itself as the cultural epicentre of Asian culture. Korean pop music, or K-pop, has been exported with great success all over the continent and Korean TV dramas are watched from Tokyo to Beijing. South Korean films are the enormously popular throughout Asia (with the exception of India) and the level of Korea’s cultural influence continues to grow.

This is not to say that South Korea doesn’t face significant challenges. The inexorable rise of China and the political, cultural and military influence that comes in its wake is something all Asian countries wrestle with. The politicians in Seoul have the

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