ABSTRACT
Introduction South Korea not only industrialized but also democratized during the last half a century or so. During the same period, it had been absorbing economic ideas from the Western world – as it had done earlier. This coincidence motivates us to suspect that there may have been significant interactions between its socioeconomic development and its adoption of Western economic ideas. New economic ideas, as have been the case with other socio-cultural things (bicycles) and thoughts (Christianity), go through a few stages until they are incorporated into everyday language: introduction, rejection or acceptance, transformation, diffusion, final settlement and so on. Given this background, the chapter examines how Western Economics has been reshaped and transformed in South Korea. This task starts with introducing a brief history of importing Western Economic Ideas (Lee, 1985; Cho, 2005).
