Both countries have endured difficult histories, riven by conquest, war, destruction, colonisation by others, and suffering — before achieving democracy around the same time, in the early 1990s.
Democracy (and a market economy) alone does not automatically set the nation on the path to economic prosperity. There are perhaps no better contrasting examples that underscore this than the economic developments in two countries — South Africa and South Korea. We will attempt to highlight and present the facts, the countries’ similarities and importantly, their differences, and the underlying causes that set them on completely different economic trajectories in the past three decades.
A bit of history
