Development Strategies, Welfare Regime and Poverty Reduction in the Republic of Korea (Country Overview Paper 5) (Draft)

A billion people in the world still live in absolute poverty, most of them in developing countries. In order to fight poverty, developing countries should aim for both economic and social development. A number of development strategies have been tried for the last half century; some were successful while others only produced disappointing outcomes. This paper will examine the Republic of Korea’s development strategy that transformed one of the poorest countries in Asia in the 1950s into an industrialized nation with low levels of poverty and a high reserve of human resources. The paper aims to identify mechanisms that are able to combine economic development and poverty reduction.