一九九七年亞洲金融危機爆發之後，許多韓國企業為了求生，開始縮減人事費用，造成非正式員工的數量大幅增加。根據韓國勞動社會研究所二○○六年的調查，韓國有百分之五十五的勞工是非正式員工；換言之，兩個勞工就有一個是派遣人員或打工族，比日本的百分之三十三更加嚴重。為了降低非正式員工的比例，二○○七年，韓國政府開始施行非正式員工保護法──禁止企業濫用非正式員工，規定企業對工作兩年以上者有「轉正式員工之義務」，並且禁止「薪資等的差別待遇」，違反企業最高可處日幣一千萬的罰款；然而，該法案卻招致出乎意料的結果。
據南韓媒體報導，根據南韓最新的調查顯示，南韓今年應屆大學畢業生的平均起薪是198萬韓圜(約新台幣7萬多元)，比去年上漲了5.5%。相較於台灣的大學畢業生平均起薪約2萬5到2萬7千元，顯示南韓的經濟成長驚人。但南韓近年來的物價水準已超過台灣，因此高所得也代表著支出高過台灣。
人家是我們的三倍...><...
Korea's favourite Neo-Keynesian economist/Cambridge professor Ha-joon Chang spoke at SOAS a couple of days ago and while I had problems with a lot of what he said, I must admit that he is a very entertaining speaker. The subject of his talk was 'Lazy Japanese and thieving Germans - does culture matter for economic development?', and was apparently based on a chapter in his forthcoming book, the title of which I can't remember. Actually, the first part of his talk was the best - he put up on the OHP a battery of quotations from British travel writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries going on about how terribly lazy, untrustworthy, unproductive, irrational, emotional and bad at timekeeping the Germans and Japanese were. His point was to (quite rightly) rubbish the currently resurgent ideas in mainstream economics about the importance of 'culture' to development. He didn't deny the possible importance of 'culture' but tried to show that the ideas that cultures were fixed or that certain cultures were inferior to others were wrong. He made rather a good, lighthearted comparison of Confucianism and Islam to show, conclusively, that Islam provided a far better culture for development, in fact, quite definitely the best culture possible for capitalist development (I think his argument rested largely on the fact that the Prophet was a merchant).
若地圖重劃的計畫成功，還可能成為該國另一項明星出口商品。南韓有將國內問題轉化成出口商機的傳統。亞洲金融風暴後，南韓政府投資數十億美元建立寬頻網路，此後，韓國公司便開始出口線上遊戲和寬頻顧問服務。
