A plan at Kaesong, and a slowdown from 2012

The notes are a student reading of Korea’s economy, of external trends, and of the export slowdown after 2012. On Kaesong they write that, had the plan held, there would have been an eight-million-pyeong complex, some 2,000 firms, and more than $50 billion of output a year. Development, they say, stopped fully after the Lee Myung-bak government — a typo, 중단되엇다, read as “was stopped.” Five-year survival rates, as the notes record them, sit under 20% in lodging and food, and in the mid-20s in wholesale and retail.

Export-led growth, they write, strengthened after the mid-1990s, then became unstable. From 2012, growth in exports slowed, centred on intermediate goods; 2015 recorded a negative rate. They point to China’s slowdown and to a maturing global supply-chain strategy. After the crises of 1997 and 2008, growth had already stepped down; from 2012 there were four consecutive years of sub-3% growth. From 2011, inflation fell rapidly, and the possibility of deflation was raised. Ageing, uncertainty in asset markets, and polarisation fed a concern the notes write as a “Korean-style long slump.” All of these figures are kept in the window of the notes, not recast as a later official total.

What the export-led regime cost, and a call to rebalance

The export-led regime, they write, weakened domestic industrial linkages and divorced production from income, yet it survived on the single merit of contributing to growth. The notes call for a shift toward growth led by domestic demand and by income, and for a balance between exports and the home market. A second export-led regime after the 1990s is sketched as manufacturing chaebol assembly industrialisation, an East Asian division of production, dependence on China, modularisation and automation, a supply-led pattern, and the exclusion of skill and labour.

Cho Jang-ok, chair of the Korean Economic Association as the notes name him, is cited on the arrival of the Trump administration and on the need for institutional innovation. That is left as the then-present of the notes, not stretched into a later official claim, and no other title is invented for him.

A then-present sketch of three economies

The same unique offers country sketches as they then stood, and this reading does not invent exact numbers where the notes only say “slight.” In the United States, indicators were recovering: nonfarm payrolls rebounded, unemployment was slightly up but still low, pending home sales and S&P Case-Shiller 20-city prices were up, and private consumption was up (a typo, 게절, read as a seasonal adjustment) by $10 billion, while consumer confidence sat below 100. In China, the slowdown in growth was continuing, fixed investment was down, a real-estate index was low — the lowest in ten years, as the notes write it — manufacturing PMI was below 50 and falling, the trade surplus was shrinking steadily, and industrial production and retail sales were slightly up year on year. The eurozone, they write, showed only very gradual growth. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of Korea’s post-2012 export slowdown and a call to rebalance toward domestic demand.

Last updated: 15 November 2026