1. Introduction: Change and Continuity in Institutional Transformation in Korea

The political economy in South Korea (hereafter Korea) has dramatically transformed since the Asian financial crisis in 1997. Interestingly, since the crisis, the political economy of Korea has displayed two diametrically opposed features (Park 2015). One the one hand, the institutional foundations that spearheaded high economic growth until the 1980s eroded in the face of the forces of globalization ushered in by the crisis (Pirie 2006, 2012; Moon and Chung 2014). It seems that under the exponentially increasing complexity of the world economy, the Korean government is no longer able to provide a strategic guidance for the national economy, rapidly converging into the Anglo-American model of political economy. The track record of liberalization measures such as financial liberalization, corporate governance reform, and labor reform suggests that the empirical basis of these arguments is robust.