ABSTRACT
The 1997 Korean crisis represented more than simply the collapse of a particular regime of accumulation or a hiatus in the country’s long economic ascent. It represented a human tragedy. In the wake of the crisis unemployment more than quadrupled, labour market participation rates and real wages fell sharply, and income inequality increased dramatically (OECD, 1999a; S.-L. Park, 1999). The social effects of the crisis were so obvious and severe that no serious analyst of the Korean political economy could ignore them. A plethora of policy-oriented and more academic research papers were published in the years immediately following the crisis which attempted assess its social impact (You and Lee, 1999; Kim and Moon, 2000; Lee and Lee, 2000; Yoon, 2001).
