From East Asian “miracle” to neoliberal “mediocrity”: the effects of liberalization and financial opening on the post-crisis Korean economy

Prior to late 1997, Korea’s state-guided East Asian economic model was widely admired by Western economists, the IMF and the World Bank for its exceptional long-term development record. For example, Stanley Fischer, later to become chief economist for the IMF, wrote in 1996 that “there really has been a miracle in East Asia” and that the view that government action was central to this success is “widely shared” (Fischer, 1996, pp. 345 and 347).