ABSTRACT
Korea's case is a good example of the rapidity of recent developments in retail internationalization in East Asia. The Korean retail sector had been a closed market, lagging much behind the impressive advances made in the country's manufacturing industry (Sternquist 2007). Progress was very slow until the mid-1990s, after which time the retail industry began to take impressive strides towards advancement and liberalization. The Korean retail market after the mid-1990s, to a great extent, has been influenced by two main drivers: the Korean government's agreement to full-scale liberalization with the implementation of the GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services) and the economic crisis of 1997 which induced extensive economic reforms. As foreign retailers began to enter the domestic market from the early 1990s, retail formats increasingly diversified and competition between similar and dissimilar retail formats has considerably intensified.
