It has been a long-standing paradox in the field of development economics that South Korea, which had realized remarkable gain in the real wages of workers and expanding employment opportunities, has suffered from serious labor unrest and worker dissatisfaction. Six specialists from the U.S. and Korea attempt in this rare volume to analyze this riddle...This joint effort succeeds in shedding new light on the complex economic and social strains that are likely to accompany the rapid transformation of an industrializing society. It provides valuable guidance to policy makers of countries experiencing similar economic and social metamorphosis. Recommended for upper-division undergraduate through professional collections.
   --K. B. Lee, Choice

This volume is the last in an important and influential series of ten volumes produced jointly by the Harvard Institute for International Development and the Korea Development Institute on the first three decades of Korean economic development. It concentrates primarily on the late 1980s...The great value of the volume is the challenge it lays down in interpretation: the standard factors that many commentators put forward for Korea's economic growth--the social tradition, low wages, control, long hours--simply will not do, some for the whole period of development, and none in respect to the last decade. Statistical documentation is impressive, and the conclusions are, therefore, difficult to fault.
   --Keith Howard, Asian Affairs [UK

Ezra F. Vogel is Henry Ford II Research Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University.

Read More by Ezra F. Vogel:

• The Four Little Dragons: The Spread of Industrialization in East Asia
• One Step Ahead in China: Guangdong under Reform
• The Golden Age of the U.S.-China-Japan Triangle, 1972-1989