Anne Lee: Global Korea

Anne Lee
The development of means of transportation and communication has changed the globe into a global village. If you are an ambitious businessman, you will make your target market not only your own country but also the entire world. This unavoidable new wave has affected most of the world. Korea is also no exception in this globalization wave. Globalization has had great effects on the industrial structure, job opportunities, society and culture of Korea.

First of all, globalization of labor market and trade has dramatically affected Korean industries. Labor-intensive industries such as textile sectors, clothing sectors, once contributed to the initiative economic booming in Korea. However, rising labor cost obstructed further growth of these parts of indusries. Consequently, they turned their eye to the neighboring countries to look for a cheap labor market since neiboring countries were no longer far away countries. Alternative driving power of economic growth of Korea was IT industry. Therefore, government made great effort and investment on training IT engineers. Those highly skilled human resource did their job more than expectation of country up to the economic crisis in 1996. Combination of unrest of Korean economy and golden hello of developed countries made brain drain. Because traveling and movement of their business or residence to another country was not an impossible issue any more, manufacturers moved their factories to China, Vietnam and skilled workers moved to developed countries to receive more benefits. As a consequence of those movements, the industrial structure is forming into new one. The trend of trade also made a great impact on Korean industrial structure. Since the entire world is a marketing place, we have had to respect WTO. If we want fair competition in the trade with other countries, we should respect their expectation of fair competition in domestic market either although it has drastic downside. As a result of moving toward export-oriented strategy for development of country, changes in industries were inevitable.

Secondly, changes of industries made huge impact on job opportunities in Korea. People who do not have many skill and education used to have enough income for supporting their family from hard working in labor-intensive industries. However, many of them plunged into poverty due to job losses and lack of job opportunities. Since those industries moved their factories to China and even small sweat shops hired illegal cheaper foreign labor, there were no more job for them. People who are skilled and educated but not overseas trained or not highly educated also have difficulties to find education-appropriate jobs. Because increasing number of overseas educated or trained work forces are taking over their job places, they lower their job expectations.

Thirdly, less job opportunities for domestic people and more job opportunities for foreign work force have affected Korean society. As a consequence of lack of job opportunities for grass-roots, the number of city slummers and homeless people has been increased considerably. It brought higher crime rate and more insecure sense to the whole society. More and more hiring foreigners to do menial jobs forced our society to forget about pride of a homogeneous nation. Without foreign work force, small business cannot survive any more. As living with those people who came from all over the world became necessary, Korean society started opening our door to the multicultural society.

Finally, these changes have affected not only society but also it's culture. Nowadays, more koreans are moving to other countries with our unique culture and more foreigners are coming to Korea to live with their own culture. Consequently, Korean culture is moving toward multi-culturalism. Despite the fact that it is just beginning, it is obviously predictable move. However, there are great concern about losing Korean cultural identity.

To conclude, globalization has already made a huge impact on the industrial structure, job opportunities, society and culture of Korea, and it is still an on-going situation. If it is inevitable, we should try to gain competitive edges through analysis and research.