Teaching East Asia: Korea Teaching East Asia: Korea | Page 95

A Document-Based Question
Korea’s Economic Development
Despite early economic struggles and the devastation wrought by the Korean War, South Korea
has achieved an incredible record of growth and integration into the world economy since the
early 1960s. In 1961, monetary value of all goods and services produced in the country, or the
gross national domestic product (GDP), was at the level of many poor developing countries. By
2004, South Korea had joined the wealthiest of the world’s economies. The GDP per capita
adjusted by Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) was recorded at 34,386 US dollars in 2015, higher
than the average European Union countries.
The Lesson: Korea’s Economic Development
Grades: 10 and 12
Subjects: World History and Economics
Time: One or more class periods
Objectives:
1. Demonstrate to students the importance of finding the most reliable sources of
information.
2. Convey how South Korea was able to achieve rapid economic development and
technological advancement after the devastating Korean War.
3. Provide awareness of the importance of education not only for the individual, but the
value of recognizing that when a nation’s citizens are well-educated and highly motivated
the quality of life for virtually everyone can improve.
4. Build upon one’s knowledge of history and economics.
5. Support a key theme of the Advanced Placement World history exam: “Creation,
Expansion, and Interaction of Economic Systems.” (Note the following quotation)
“The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have witnessed experiments with many forms of
economic organization, as well as a steady march toward the near-complete globalization of
economic affairs, a development that has presented both costs and benefits….Immense wealth
has been created in the aggregate during this era – more than the world has ever seen before –
but it remains very unevenly distributed, both within societies and between them.” (AP World
History, Barron’s, 2016)
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