Gloating

The authors of this new estimate of GDP growth in Korea during the colonial period are clearly South Korean

Per capita output growth in colonial Korea, 2.3% p.a. from 1911 to 1940, was considerably slower than that occurring in South Korea, 7.9% p.a. from 1960 to 1990. Nevertheless, colonial Korea surpassed the rest of the world in growth performance as did South Korea: Angus Maddison's estimated that the world average per capita output grew 0.93% per year during 1913–1940 and 2.3% per year 1950–1990. In contrast, not only did growth ground to a halt in North Korea, but also the country began to suffer worsening living standards from around 1990, repeating the performance as delivered by late dynastic Korea. The superior performance of northern relatively to southern Korea under Japanese rule indicates that North Korea has only itself to blame for its economic failure.

One policy choice to reverse the fortunes of the two Koreas appeared to concern whether colonial system was allowed to continue to function. Colonial institutions were designed to stimulate investment, rather than to facilitate extraction, the most important example being well-defined land property as introduced by the Cadastral Survey. Replacing such useful institutions with a system of command in North Korea had disastrous consequences, while in the absence of a regime shift South Korea was able to continue to achieve high growth, as Taiwan and Japan were.

This is a starkly revisionist account. Apparently the accepted historical interpretation (at least until relatively recently) was that Korea was experience indigenous economic growth until the Japanese came and ruined it. As this passage implies, recent quantitative reassessments have shown that the exact opposite is true: Korea was in a rather nasty malthusian B phase in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, but from the late 19th c onward (after the Japanese forced the country open to commerce and then colonized it), it experienced rather impressive economic growth both in aggregate and per capita. The magnitude of these results is actually pretty surprising, since Japan only began modern grown a few decades before and didn't achieve a growth rate much higher than that estimated here. After all, colonialism surely cause had some negative economic impact, because if not, why bother with imperial domination at all?

Of course, this only poses as a puzzle what the 2nd paragraph above answers all to blithely: what happened to get this rather sudden transition? Clear title to land probably helps, but it hardly seems to be sufficient, either.