A Schumpeterian Analysis of the Saemaul Undong Movement in 1970s South Korea within the CDD Framework

In the 1970s, the Park Chung Hee government launched the Saemaul Undong (New Village) Movement to address the widening urban-rural income gap. This is often interpreted as a politically-motivated project due to the fact that promoting the SU movement requires a political system capable of sufficient gathering of resources. This paper takes on a different perspective in looking at the components of the SU movement. The goal of this paper is two-pronged: to identify elements of Community-Driven Development (CDD) in the SU movement, and to analyze the SU movement using Schumpeterian concepts in order to draw some implications from the SU model for the economic development in the developing world. While the movement was implemented prior to the conception of CDD as a framework, the elements of CDD of community participation, civic capacities and resource availability were already used. On the other hand, the Schumpeterian concepts of endogenous growth (administrative arrangements, communal empowerment and the community funding), creative destruction (developing civic capacities and ideological reform), innovation (spread of agricultural and non-agricultural technologies), entrepreneurship (Saemaul leaders and education) and minimal role of state (incentive-oriented strategy of the government) were identified in the components of the SU movement