Social Sustainability in South Korea

Abstract

The East Asian crisis revealed tautologies, once again, on the key factors of development in both positive and negative sidelines. Analyzing the causal relationship between growth and quality of life, the current attempt to explore the developmental state towards sustainable development is shown to suffer from severe limitations: the Korean case addresses the disputed argument that the level of economic growth and the type of political regimes paradoxically influence quality of life processes. Combining both quantitative and qualitative methods, the analysis involves the testing and refining of some parameters and working hypotheses about the relationships among state, growth, and quality of life. What emerges from the study is that Korea's path to quality of life has been a dynamic process determined by historical contingencies, with some contradictions of subjective and objective dimensions, and a dialectical relationship between the state and civil society. The discussion flags a welfare-oriented approach on the basis of the derived counterfactual, which contains the simultaneous existence of elements of progress and regression in the process of quality of life. The analysis suggests that by delimiting the arena of the developmental state, with the notion of developmental transformation, the synergy effects of growth and quality of life will, in the long term, contribute to the development of socio-political processes toward social sustainability.