Understanding Post-Crisis Growth of the Korean Economy: Growth Accounting and Cross-Country Regressions

This paper examines sources of growth of Korea’s economy for the period from 1980 to 2005, based on both primal and dual growth accounting methodology employed by Young (1995) and Hsieh (2002). Also, this paper evaluates post-crisis growth performance of Korea, using cross-country comparison of growth accounting results and cross-country regressions. Main results of this paper are as follows. First, the growth slowdown after the crisis has been mainly driven by the slowdown of per worker capital accumulation. By contrast, the estimated TFPG of Korea for the period from 2001 to 2005 seems higher than, or at least roughly comparable to, the estimated TFPG in the pre-crisis period of 1991-1995. In theses respects, there were no substantial differences between the results obtained from primal and dual growth accounting methodology. Second, the cross-country regressions revealthat post-crisis growth slowdown of the Korea’s economy can be largely attributed to world growth slowdown (decade effect) and East Asia-specific effects. In particular, it was found that the noticeable decelerationin per worker capital accumulation can be mostly attributed to some unknown factors which commonly affected East Asian countries. Viewed from an international perspective, the lowered post-crisis per worker GDP growth rate, as well as per-worker capital growth, which triggered concerns and debates in varying contexts, still seems respectable. So, the slowdown in capital accumulation is likely to be mainly a story of spectacularly high rate of capital accumulation in the pre-crisis period, not a story of ‘weak’ investment after the crisis