The politics of industrial leapfrogging: The semiconductor industry in Taiwan and South Korea

This study analyzes the causes of the different approaches adopted by Taiwan and South Korea in order to accomplish the same policy goals--developing indigenous semiconductor industries. Acknowledging the structural similarities among East Asian late developers, much of the existing literature on East Asian development tends to view the state and state-society relations as invariant through time, across societies, and across industrial sectors, and thereby it fails to explain the complex interplay between the state and society under the changing structural constraints, both from domestic and international sources.;By examining the semiconductor development of Taiwan and South Korea from a comparative historical context, I intend first to demonstrate that there is variation in the state and state-society relations in East Asian development, and second to uncover the causes of the variation. In the course of semiconductor development, the Taiwanese state has played a dominant and pervasive role, while the Korean state has been more or less cooperative with the industry. In explaining the causes of the variation, I primarily focus on three variables--business structures, state structures, and international contexts.;Business structures are directly related to the strength of societal actors in interest group representation. State structures refer to the institutional arrangements of the state regarding the science and technology policies, semiconductors in particular. International contexts are the external factors that delimit the behavior of the state and societal actors in promoting the semiconductor industry. Because the United States is the most important source of bilateral trade conflicts with Taiwan and South Korea, this study primarily focuses on the American pressure upon these two countries in regard to the industrial targeting by the respective governments. According to the empirical evidence presented in this study, the differences in the three variables described above are largely responsible for the formation of different approaches to the same policy goals, which indicates that the state and state-society relations in East Asian late developers, Taiwan and South Korea in particular, are variant depending upon the structural constraints imposed by the domestic and international political economies.