This Week: Funniest Moments
Thanksgiving Poem
Thanksgiving There’s something serene in the welling of tears A calm in the heaviness that starts in my throat And is anchored in my gut Peace of mind comes from my furrowed brow Inhaling the cold, still loneliness Exhaling their distant warmth Eyes closed, I give thanks Knowing that somewhere, An unfathomable number of miles away There are people whose chests also ache Whose eyes won’t be dry Who miss me too. Maeve Wall is 2015-2016 ETA at Sadaebucho Elementary School in Daegu.
“Miraculous” for Whom
by Abhik Pramanik, ETA ’15-’16 Despite Korea’s rapid ascension from economic basket case post Korean War to a global heavyweight referred to as the “Miracle on the Han River,” the Asian Financial Crisis and the years hence have revealed a dark underside to Seoul’s economic might. Indisputably, South Korea is among the richest nations in the global economy. Currently, it is considered the 13th wealthiest country by the World Bank, sandwiched between Australia and Spain with a GDP of approximately $1.4 trillion. However, despite Seoul’s “miraculous” rise to global economic prominence, it is still the most parsimonious public spender among the so-called developed nations. According toOECD Stat, public expenditure in the Republic of Korea only matched 10.4% of GDP in 2014 – comfortably the lowest among all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. The second stingiest nation is Iceland, whose public expenditure comes in at 16.5% of GDP. However, Iceland’s GDP per capita in 2014 – $52,005 USD – is nearly double South Korea’s measure of $27,970 USD from the same year. This low level of public expenditure also coincides with a decadal increase in inequality in South Korea that was precipitated by the Asian Financial Crisis. From 1990-1995, South Korea’s average Gini coefficient was .258. In 1999, in the dead center of the crisis, Seoul’s coefficient had risen to .298. Eleven years later, in 2010, the ROK’s Gini coefficient had risen even further to .315. This rise in the coefficient reflects changes in the share of income held by the top 10% of Korean income holders from 1990 to 2010. In 1990, the top 10% held 3.30 times more wealth than the bottom 10%; but in 2010, that figure had increased by roughly 50% to 4.90. [1. Koo, Hagen. “Inequality in South Korea,” East Asia Forum, July 1st 2014.] Despite the ROK’s immense GDP, the growing level of inequality throughout Korean society raises the question of societal equity and social responsibility. In an economically prosperous nation, is it the role of government to ensure that no citizen is left materially and/or socially behind? In the event of widespread poverty and economic inequality, is it the government’s responsibility to alleviate said inequality? In the immediate onset of the Asian Financial Crisis, it would appear that Korea’s answer to these questions was a resounding “yes.” In January 1998, then President-elect Kim Dae Jung promised “workers a ‘U.S. style’ social welfare,” in response to the gigantic labor crisis that some scholars argue Dae Jung’s policies “were bound to create”.[2. Crotty, James & Lee, Kang-Kook. “Korea’s Neoliberal Restructuring: Miracle or Disaster?,” Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2001, p. 3.] To understand the current state of the Korea welfare system, it is first necessary to trace the origins of the Asian Financial Crisis and the IMF restructuring of the Korean economy that concurrently took place. It is through this period of deep economic insecurity for Korean workers combined with a growing shift in attitude among younger Koreans about their obligations to the family that the Korean welfare system was first born. The Asian Financial Crisis & Neoliberal Restructuring The Asian Financial Crisis had a drastic impact on the Korean economy. Especially vulnerable to the crisis was the Korean financial sector, which had employed incredibly reckless lending practices upon its opening to foreign markets in the early 90s. In November 1997, Korean banks held $52 billion in non-performing loans it had doled out to cash-hungry chaebols, which constituted roughly 17% of the financial industry’s total debt. As a result, international traders attacked the Korean currency, driving the exchange rate from 844 won to the dollar in January 1997, to a high of 2000 won per dollar in December. That same December, 123 Korean companies failed each day on average. Moreover, the high trade deficit the Korean government had been running the previous three years meant that Seoul lacked the foreign currency to bail its conglomerates out of the growing crisis.[3. Lee, S. Keun. “Financial Crisis in Korea and IMF: Analysis and Perspectives,” Presentation at Hofstra University, 1998.] As a result, the Korean government accepted an IMF bailout of 57 billion USD on the condition of several neoliberal reforms. These included the floating of the Korean currency on the international market, the opening up of Korean companies to foreign ownership, wider allowable daily fluctuations of the Korean stock market, and a massive increase in interest rates to 30%. Unlike most other developing nations, Korea wholeheartedly embraced the IMF’s proposed reforms. For example, though the IMF demanded that Korean listed companies be allowed to have up to 55% foreign ownership, the Dae Jung regime made 100% foreign ownership of Korean firms permissible by the end of 1998. [4. Ibid] Such reforms came at a high cost. From an incredibly low unemployment rate of 2.1% in October 1997, unemployment skyrocketed to 8.6% in February 1999. As others have argued, however, the Dae Jung government foresaw this spike in unemployment from the outset. Kim Dae Jung was an incredibly pro-market politician, who stated in his 1985 book, Mass-Participatory Economy: a Democratic Alternative for Korea, that “maximum reliance on the market is the operating principle of my program” and that “world integration is our historic mission”.[5. Crotty, James & Lee, Kang-Kook. “A Political-Economic Analysis of the Failure of Neoliberal Restructuring in Post-Crisis Korea,” February 2002, p. 4.] Additionally, in the midst of the deep recession, Kim announced that he “believe[d] that the crisis will be remembered as a blessing…because it is forcing essential economic changes”.[6. NYT, February 8th 1999, Online.] Despite the ominous predictions of several prominent economists such as Paul Krugman and Jeffrey Sachs at the time, the IMF and Kim Dae Jung undertook the neoliberalization of the Korean economy at breakneck speed.[7. Crotty, James & Lee, Kang-Kook. “A Political-Economic Analysis of the Failure of Neoliberal Restructuring in Post-Crisis Korea,” February 2002, p. 5.] Many view Kim Dae Jung’s failure to heed such admonitions as explicitly political, as the extent of the free-market reforms he demanded would have been met with fierce resistance in