ABSTRACT
Like its East Asian neighbors, Korea has experienced rapid and sustained economic growth since the 1960s. No country has industrialized without urbanization, and Korea is no exception: the share of its urban population has grown in tandem with the rapid growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), from 39 percent in 1960 to 91 per cent in 2015. Again, similar to other East Asian countries, Korea had very high urban as well as rural population densities that worked as an accelerator of rural-to-urban migration during the high-growth period (Renaud, Kim, and Cho 2016). In particular, between 1960 and 2015, the population of the Seoul Capital Region (SCR, including Seoul, Incheon, and Gyeonnggi Province, which surrounds Seoul) grew from 5.1 million to 25.4 million. The SCR’s population share also increased steeply from 20.8 percent to 49.4 percent.
