Korea - knowledge economy

Korea's Transition to a Knowledge Economy

The Republic of Korea has been experiencing rapid, and more importantly, sustained economic growth since the 1960s. This has resulted in its real GDP per capita increasing rapidly enabling the once low-income country to join the ranks of high-income industrialized nations within a short time span of four and half decades. Moreover, the majority of this growth can be attributed to knowledge accumulation, rather than to the accumulation of traditional factors of production of capital and labor.

Korea had achieved this knowledge-based growth by investing heavily in education and training, boosting innovation through intensive research and development, developing a modern and accessible information infrastructure, all coupled with a stable economic and conducive institutional regime that enabled the knowledge-related investments to flourish. Due to this, Korea has ably made its transition to a knowledge economy, that is, an economy that uses knowledge as the key engine of growth. Its successful knowledge-based development experience offers many valuable lessons for developing economies.