IESET.
Policies·kr_capital_account_liberalisation_1993_1997

South Korea capital-account liberalisation 1993-1997

KOR·1993 1997·DLP/NKP under President Kim Young-samcandidate
movesfinancial deregulation

What the policy did

Sequence of capital-account liberalisation measures under Kim Young- sam's segyehwa (globalisation) agenda including permissive short- term foreign-currency borrowing by 30 merchant banks, FDI inflow liberalisation, stock-market opening to foreign investors (25% cap raised from 10%), and bond-market opening. Short-term external debt rose from $40bn (1993) to $97bn (Sep 1997) against $21bn forex reserves by Nov 1997 — direct mechanism of the Dec 1997 crisis.

Policy-content fingerprint — what this policy moved, on which axes

Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.

intended
financial deregulation
regulatory.financial_deregulation
Financial-sector regulation — banking separation, capital requirements, cross-border activity rules, derivatives oversight.
increased · strong
tighter financial regulation
Short-term external borrowing liberalised for merchant banks; stock/bond-market opening.

Enacted by

Empirical evidence — linked hypotheses

Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".

Major episodes of financial deregulation — the 1999 US Gramm-Leach- Bliley repeal of Glass-Steagall, the 1986 UK Financial Services Act ("Big Bang"), Chile's 1974-1981 banking liberalisation, Sweden's late-1980s credit-market liberalisation, and Japan's 1996-2001 Big Bang — are followed within 10 years by higher-than-baseline incidence of banking crises, measured by the Laeven-Valencia Systemic Banking Crisis Database, and by elevated credit-to-GDP gaps per BIS.
financial_deregulation_crisis_vulnerabilityinferred
viaregulatory.financial_deregulation
SUPPORTED — sign matches claim +, ATT=+0.04145, p=3.34e-07, N=302, treated_countries=8
supported
The 2007-2009 global financial crisis originated in household-debt-financed consumption sustaining aggregate demand despite stagnant real wages, a Minsky-plus-Marx pattern.
gfc_household_debt_wage_stagnation_linkinferred
viaregulatory.financial_deregulation
PARTIAL — coef=-0.01111, p=0; claim direction not auto-inferred
partial
In an OECD panel 2000-2023, increases in OECD Product Market Regulation (PMR) stringency and increases in regulatory uncertainty (proxied by year-to-year changes in the OECD PMR sub-indices) are negatively associated with private non-residential investment as a share of GDP, with effects concentrated in capital-intensive long-duration sectors.
hayek_regulatory_uncertainty_investment_chillinginferred
viaregulatory.financial_deregulation
REFUTED — coef=-3.98 (sign opposite claim +), p=0
refuted
In a broad-country panel 1990-2020, mortgage-market liberalisation episodes (abolition of interest-rate caps, reduction of down-payment requirements, privatisation of state mortgage banks, and introduction of securitisation) predict higher homeownership rates, higher residential investment as a share of GDP, and lower housing-rent-to-income ratios, controlling for income growth, demographic structure, and urbanisation.
mortgage_market_liberalisation_homeownership_panelinferred
viaregulatory.financial_deregulation
PARTIAL — coef=+0.972, p=0.606 (above α=0.1); direction inconclusive
partial
The 1988-1993 Nordic banking crises (Norway 1988-1991, Sweden 1991-1992, Finland 1991-1993) are a canonical post-deregulation credit-boom-bust panel.
banking_crisis_nordic_1991_1993_panelinferred
viaregulatory.financial_deregulation
SUPPORTED
supported
In the Schularick-Taylor cross-country macrohistory panel restricted to the post-1980 era, sustained acceleration of bank credit to the private non-financial sector relative to GDP raises the conditional probability of a systemic banking crisis within a five-year forward window.
banking_crisis_schularick_taylor_credit_boom_panel_post1980inferred
viaregulatory.financial_deregulation
SUPPORTED — coef=+0.001376 (sign matches claim +), p=9.27e-07
supported
Across countries 1990-2020, higher capital-account openness (proxied by EFW area-4 freedom-to-trade-internationally sub- components covering capital controls, plus IMF AREAER-derived binary capital-control intensity where available) predicts higher subsequent 10-year real per-capita GDP growth, conditional on initial income, rule-of-law level, trade openness, and financial- development depth.
liberal_capital_account_openness_growth_premium_panelinferred
viaregulatory.financial_deregulation
PARTIAL — coef=+1.115e-17, p=0.0255; effect magnitude effectively zero
partial
Liberal democracies experience monotonic positional drift toward larger, more redistributive states across multi-decade horizons.
liberal_democracy_managerial_flywheel_driftinferred
viaregulatory.financial_deregulation
REFUTED — median final drift = -3.00 (13/26 positive, share = 50%). The corpus does not show monotonic statist drift across the liberal-democracy panel.
refuted

Similar historical policies

Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.

References