Review of Economics and Statistics
Industrialization and the Big Push: Theory and Evidence from South Korea
2026-03-24
We study how temporary subsidies for adoption of modern foreign technology drove South Korea’s industrialization in the 1970s. Leveraging unique historical data, we provide causal evidence consistent with coordination failures: adoption improved adopters’ performance and generated local spillovers, with firms more likely to adopt when other local firmshad already adopted.We incorporate these findings into a quantitative model, where the potential for multiple steady states depends on parameters mapped to the causal estimates. In our calibrated model, South Korea’s temporary subsidies shifted its economy to a more industrialized steady state, increasing heavy manufacturing’s GDP share by 27% and export intensity by 39%. Larger market access and lower idiosyncratic distortions amplified the effects of these subsidies, as the gains from adoption increase with firm scale.