In 1953, South Korea had a per-capita income lower than that of Somalia or Haiti — and within roughly seventy years, it became the world’s tenth-largest economy and the dominant global producer of memory chips, in the fastest national economic transformation in modern history

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The economic case for South Korea’s hopelessness was, in 1953, structurally compelling. The Korean Peninsula had been a single country until 1945, when the defeat of Imperial Japan resulted in its partition along the 38th parallel between Soviet and American zones of occupation. The partition had divided the peninsula’s economy along functional rather than equitable [...] The post In 1953, South Korea had a per-capita income lower than that of Somalia or Haiti — and within roughly seventy years, it became the world’s tenth-largest economy and the dominant global producer of memory chips, in the fastest national economic transformation in modern history appeared first on Space Daily .