Fashioning a new Korean model out of the crisis: the rebuilding of institutional capabilities

This article argues that the Korean model, while being remarkably effective in its early decades, had outgrown its institutional shell by the 1990s and was in need of the reforms that were hastened by the 1997 financial crisis. The article is based on an analysis of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) rescue package that was introduced in two stages in December 1997. It can be demonstrated that it represented three agendas at work--a conventional IMF agenda, a U.S. trade and investment opening agenda, as well as a Korean-imposed institutional reform agenda. It is this latter reform agenda that has shaped the restructuring initiatives taken in Korea in 1998. Copyright 1998 by Oxford University Press.