ScholarWorks@중앙대학교

초록

This study reexamines Korea's developmental welfare state through the theoretical lens of the growth-welfare model, analyzing the structure of ‘external cost-shifting’ centered on large firms. Korea has developed a distinctive coordinated economy that maintains selective protection for regular workers in large firms while systematically transferring employment and welfare costs to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and non-regular workers. Through a historical institutionalist approach, this study confirms that the institutional combination of state-led industrial policy, chaebol-centered growth strategy, and selective welfare system has formed strong path dependence since the authoritarian developmental state period. Using exploratory empirical analysis with Korean Labor and Income Panel Study (KLIPS) data, the results show that in SMEs, employment instability systematically correlates with social protection exclusion, exhibiting ‘coherent outsiderness’. In contrast, large firms demonstrate ‘segmented protection’ where workers receive substantial social protection despite employment instability. This study argues that Korea's growth-welfare model operates through a structural division of labor that maintains large firms' export competitiveness via ‘external cost-shifting’ while transferring employment and welfare costs to SMEs and non-regular workers, demonstrating the specificity of the Korean coordinated economy that is qualitatively different from Western models of ‘internal flexibilization’ such as Germany's.

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