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Knowledge Economy Gaps, Policy Syndromes, and Catch-Up Strategies: Fresh South Korean Lessons to Africa

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Abstract

Africa’s overall knowledge index fell between 2000 and 2009. South Korea’s economic miracle is largely due to a knowledge-based development strategy that holds valuable lessons for African countries in their current pursuit towards knowledge economies. Using updated data (1996–2010), this paper presents fresh South Korean lessons to Africa by assessing the knowledge economy (KE) gaps, deriving policy syndromes, and providing catch-up strategies. The 53 peripheral African countries are decomposed into fundamental characteristics of wealth, legal origins, regional proximity, oil-exporting, political stability, and landlockedness. The World Bank’s four KE components are used: education, innovation, information and communication technology (ICT), and economic incentives and institutional regime. Absolute beta and sigma convergence techniques are employed as empirical strategies. With the exception of ICT for which catch-up is not very apparent, in increasing order, it is visible in innovation, economic incentives, education, and institutional regime. The speed of catch-up varies between 8.66 and 30.00 % per annum with respective time to full or 100 % catch-up of 34.64 and 10 years. Based on the trends and dynamics in the KE gaps, policy syndromes and compelling catch-up strategies are discussed. Issues standing on the way to KE in Africa are dissected with great acuteness before South Korean relevant solutions are provided to both scholars and firms. The paper is original in its provision of practical policy initiatives drawn from the Korean experience to African countries embarking on a transition to KE.

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Notes

  1. South Korea and Korea are used interchangeably throughout the paper.

  2. “There is some scepticism about Korea as role model of development as the Korean model involved a considerable degree of state activism, unacceptable in today’s global environment” (Lee 2009, p. 1).

  3. For instance, “After the Korean war, South Korea was one of the world’s poorest countries with only $64 per capita income. Economically, in the 1960s it lagged behind the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) – currently holding elections marred by violence. Since then the country’s fortunes have diverged spectacularly. South Korea now belongs to the rich man’s club, the OECD development assistance committee (DAC). The DRC has gone backwards since independence and, out of 187 countries, ranked bottom in the 2011 Human Development Index” (Tran 2011).

  4. Source of per capita values: http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/korea/gdp-per-capita (accessed on 14/06/2015).

  5. The proportions of common variations among KE components corresponding to the chosen eigenvalues (reflecting the eigenvectors) justify the high correlation among KE dimensions. Owing to space constraint, the underlying correlation analyses can be provided upon request.

  6. “We also demonstrate that more plausible results can be achieved using a system GMM estimator suggested by Arellano and Bover (1995) and Blundell and Bond (1998). The system estimator exploits an assumption about the initial conditions to obtain moment conditions that remain informative even for persistent series, and it has been shown to perform well in simulations. The necessary restrictions on the initial conditions are potentially consistent with standard growth frameworks, and appear to be both valid and highly informative in our empirical application. Hence we recommend this system GMM estimator for consideration in subsequent empirical growth research” Bond et al. (2001, pp. 3–4).

  7. To put our point into perspective, consistent with Asongu (2014a), the estimated lagged value of a standard dynamic GMM approach is a from which 1 is subtracted to obtain β (β = a − 1). Under this scenario, the information criterion for beta-convergence is β < 0. Hence, for simplicity, a could be reported, and the 0 < |a| < 1 information criterion used to determine convergence. This is interpretation is in line with recent convergence literature (Prochniak and Witkowski 2012a, p. 20; Prochniak and Witkowski 2012b, p. 23; Asongu 2013a, 2014a).

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Acknowledgments

This paper was funded by the Global Development Network (GDN) and the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA). It received the 2014 KOICA President’s award for best submission from a developing country. I am highly indebted to: (i) Prof. Eun Mee Kim for mentorship and constructive comments; (ii) two anonymous referees for constructive comments and (iii) Ms Savi Mull and Mr Vasundhra Thakur for logistics and networking coordination.

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  1. African Governance and Development Institute, P.O. Box 1834, Yaoundé, Cameroon

    Simplice A. Asongu

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Appendices

Appendix 1

Table 6 Definition of variables
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Appendix 2

Table 7 Summary statistics
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Appendix 3

Table 8 Correlation analysis
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Appendix 4

Table 9 Categorization of countries
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Asongu, S.A. Knowledge Economy Gaps, Policy Syndromes, and Catch-Up Strategies: Fresh South Korean Lessons to Africa. J Knowl Econ 8, 211–253 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-015-0321-0

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