ABSTRACT
It is well known that the Republic of Korea experienced an economic transformation in recent decades whereby per capita growth rates of around 7 per cent a year from the early 1960s through to the 1990s transformed the country from a state of extensive poverty into one of comparative wealth. It is also well known that Korea’s education system has boomed over this period. As we saw in Chapter 1, the average education attainment (as captured by years of schooling) in the workforce now even exceeds that in many Western industrialised countries. These two facts are often packaged as a simple explanation of the ‘miracle’, namely, that the growth was stoked by human capital. Closer inspection, however, reveals that the simple argument drawn from the observed correlation does not hold. Not only can causation go the other way, from economic growth to education boom, there are many other factors contributing to Korea’s growth, not least the substantial increase in physical capital stock linked to high savings ratios.
