I've been reading through the "A History of Korea" by Michael Seth, hoping to get some insight into how Korea went from a colonized underdog into a global economic power in such a short time. The modern history of both Koreas is truly fascinating as are their early parallels.

One thing I've been surprised to learn is how much of a role various Christian groups in Korea played in anti-governmnet activities going all the way back to the Japanese Colonial period. There's some interesting and unique history there with respect to Korea's history with Christianity -- including being one of the only countries with a history of self-conversion, before missionaries ever showed up there.

More recently, the parallels between the economic development of the North and the South are quite striking. While the North made some very big economic development strides early on, the long term focus on almost pure heavy industry and military development caused the country to stagnate and economically regress -- despite an almost constant stream of aid and support from first the Soviet Bloc and then China. The infrastructure has begun to crumble because the state never bothered developing the entire economic ecosystem needed to keep it running.

The South on the other hand, under the military dictator, Park Chung-hee, took a more step-wise foundation building approach that's yielded tremendous long-term success for the country. Seizing power from an incompetently run, but democratic, government. Park put in place a complex series of programs designed to build up an export-oriented economy through gradual development of industry from light-industry to heavy.

It was tremendously corrupt, and built on lots of favor trading. But he used the power of the military and the government to keep the economy focused on pure growth, and pragmatically eliminated "non-essential" economic activities. Starting with things like sugar refineries and textile manufacturing, the country started working up to construction (a significant number of U.S. projects during the Vietnam war were built by Korean companies), then shipbuilding, cars, petrochemicals, etc. Each designed to both provide economic opportunities for export, as well as provide domestic capabilities for the next steps.

No political activity was allowed and the country was basically run like a giant, efficient, no-nonsense, military apparatus for decades. It took until the 80s before it was really time to switch off from this into the more liberal and democratic country we see today.

He financed all this with a very pragmatic finance scheme, hitting up Japans booming economy during the 60s and 70s, despite a great deal of animosity between the two countries. And then more importantly sold back the finished goods to Japan and the U.S. markets.

It was under Park that South Korea started doing major construction projects in the middle-East. The technical ability of South Korean construction companies can't be underestimated -- the Burj Khalifa was built by Samsung.

Despite significant student demonstrations and unrest during the Park administration (and the similar Chun Doo-hwan one that closely followed), most people were simply too busy working and scratching out a living to take to the streets, or form anti-government organizations.

There's other parallels as well, extremely low participation in the work force by women, a history of foreign meddling, etc.

I guess what I'm saying is that idle hands may just be the source of a lot of this misery. In richer Arab countries, most of the work is done by foreigners on the cheap and locals live off of the proceeds, they're bored and have nothing else to do. In poorer ones, people need jobs, are desperate and again, have nothing else to do.

There's been some half-hearted attempts to provide other activities. KAUST, for example, is a Science and Tech graduate-level university that's had billions invested into it. But one of the interesting points my book brings up is that setting up advanced schooling, or advanced industry, doesn't make sense unless a Park style staged economic program is put in place first to build all of the necessary social, educational and economic foundations to support these advanced industries. You can't really leapfrog these things, but you can make progress unbelievably fast.

The real problem is that, at least for the oil rich parts of the Arab world, there isn't much incentive to really do these things. If any place might have a go, someplace oil-poor, like Egypt, might be a logical place to kick off something like a "Tiger of the Nile" program. I know I'm not the first person to think of this either.

http://www.academia.edu/5319334/A_Comparison_of_the_Politica...

http://www.e-ir.info/2013/12/23/south-korea-egypt-and-waller...

http://www.imd.org/research/challenges/TC057-13-two-dictator...