Korean
Chair Questions Myths
By Sally Acharya
(From American Weekly, Nov. 28, 2006)
1 of 3 pages
The Korea that Jungho Yoo left in 1969 was a very different
place from the one he returned to in 1981.
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Dr. Jungho Yoo
Photo by Jeff Watts
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In his childhood, the horizon had been dotted with thatched
roofs and dim flashes of artillery from distant firefights.
Korea was a war-torn nation of poor farmers, with a scarcity
of arable land and natural resources that seemed to doom
it to poverty.
When he left for graduate school in the United States, there
were shoe factories and textile warehouses among the thatched
roofs, but Korean life was still a struggle, and few would
have guessed that, statistically, the boom had begun.
By the time he returned a dozen years later, the old skyline
was gone, and Seoul was glittering with cars and high-rise
buildings that house 8.5 million people. The country had
become a model for the developing world, and the “Korean
miracle” was viewed with awe and hope. It showed, many
economists believed, that certain government policies and
targeted interventions could indeed lift a country from poverty.
Yoo would not end up subscribing to that view. As a scholar,
his research would cast doubt on some widely held beliefs
about the “Korean miracle,” and provide, he hopes,
a warning to policy makers who hope to lead developing countries
along what many conceive to be the Korean path.
The widely published specialist in international trade and
economic development joined the AU faculty this spring as
the first C.W. Lim and Korea Foundation Chair of Korean Studies
at the School of International Service (SIS).
“If you uphold human rights as you should,
the economy really takes care of itself.”
— Jungho Yoo |
Funds for the chair were raised
at the initiative of Hyung-Kook Kim, former chair of the
Center for Asian Studies and now dean at Sookmyung University
in Seoul. It is named for the Korea Foundation and Choon-Won
Lim, a former congressman in South Korea and father of three
AU alumni.
Yoo was the school’s
choice as the first chair because, notes SIS dean Louis Goodman, “he
is a very distinguished Korean development economist of long
experience in one of Korea’s outstanding research institutions,” the
Korea Development Institute.
Economic development continues
to be the focus of Yoo’s scholarship and teaching.
But he also feels drawn, he says, to explore human rights
issues in deeply repressive North Korea.
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