Commendation Awards Let Foreign Workers Help Open Up Society

By Jussi Heikkola

University of Vaasa, Finland

The Republic of Korea has achieved tremendous growth in the last 30 years. During this time Korea has developed from rural society to industrial economy. The growth has been significant economically as well as socially.

The World Economic forum ranks Korea 24th in its 2006-2007 Global Competitiveness Report. Well done!

Best way to simply define the level of economical development of a country is to use the per capita GDP indicator. According to International Monetary Fund, Korea ranked 34th in the World and stands at over $18,000 in 2006, a little bit less than Slovenia, Portugal and Bahamas.

Now Korean leaders have set a goal for reaching the $30,000 mark, an achievement that acts like a standard for 21st century leading economies.

In order to reach the aspired GDP level, the economy needs to have serious support from foreign workers.

There are two types of foreign help needed; high class international experts to boost the technological and social growth of the economy & low-salary workforce to carry out the hard work.

The low-salary workforce is the economical backbone of the society's well-being, since some one needs to do the dirty work. They are needed to sustain the economical level and free up resources for growth.

An example can be seen in the U.S. or in the EU where lowly-paid service works are carried out by immigrants from less developed countries.

This will be the case also in Korea sooner or later. The Koreans are needed for economically more productive work and since the education is valued in Korea it would be a waste of time and money to assign educated people on labor-intensive works.

The work-related immigration from less developed countries always causes troubles and most of all it causes illegal immigration. According to the Korea's Justice Ministry, there are approximately 350,000 foreign workers in the country. More than 180,000 of those workers are illegal. This number is expected to grow in the future.

International experts are needed for economic and social growth, which usually go hand-in-hand. Encouraging these people to come to help Korean growth can be seen as importing of human capital.

Technologically Korea is rather advanced, especially in the industrial production, but still there are some points where foreigners could help.

First of all, in the Western environmental issues are becoming more and more important and the legislation is more and more strict all the time.

This is an area where Korea needs to improve further. In my experience Korea is more or less 10 to 15 years behind major economies (excluding China) in environmental protection and conservation.

Especially the rate of production is seen much more important than the nature. The same goes with the society, I have never before seen such kind of environmental recklessness in modern economy than what can be seen in Korea. Sad but true.

Oriental Mindset

Improving GDP per capita can be basically done in two ways, improving the output of labor or by improving the employment rating of the workforce. In general, the output of Korea is increasing and should not be a major problem.

Another problem is that an important portion of the workforce, housewives or ajumma are staying at home with their children instead of working.

Korea has done a great work while transforming from agricultural society to industrial powerhouse, probably much better than the Western could have done.

The main reason for this is so called ``Oriental mindset,'' which encourages savings and investing of money instead of spending. This can be seen as a total opposite to American ``Spend-more-than-you-make mindset.''

The next challenge for Korea is to perform the same transformation which the leading Western economies have already done, the change from manufacturing-oriented economy to services-based industry. One major reason to do so is the growing industrialization in China.

Since Korea cannot compete with Chinese salary-levels in the long run, the economy needs to focus on something else.

In order to carry out the society's structural transformation, some social changes must be carried out. So far Korea has been socially very closed country and the society has had a tremendous control over an individual.

This is simply an Oriental phenomenon called collectivism. It means that in order to feel safe and comfortable the people need to act in a very similar way, as a collective not as individuals.

Basically in the society similarity between persons is strongly encouraged and ``different'' behavioral is disapproved and often even feared. In this respect Westerners often see Korea almost as a Muslim country.

The big thing to survive from the next transformation is to let foreign experts help the Korean society to open up. Letting people be individuals encourages private spending, especially on the private sector.

This doesn't mean exactly "Americanizing" the population, but at least coming from other end to somewhere middle between individualism & collectivism.

This has been carried out in Japan and today the differences between Japanese and Korean societies are substantial, especially regarding personal identities & private spending.

Probably tolerance of different people has also some influence on the corruption level. According to the Transparency international, Korea is ranked at 42nd out of 163 nations on the World Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). At the same time Japan is ranked at 17th.

The Korean economy has been performing well to promote the living standards of the people. And if the country is acting according to these guidelines just presented, I don't see any major obstacles in their way toward one of the major players in the global economic game.