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Another argument would be that SK wouldn't have been able to maintain their GDP-per-capita growth without switching to a democratic republic.

• yorwba 6y ago
  That might seem like a good argument if you only look at the growth rate trending down under the authoritarian regime since the 1970s, but it's actually a bad argument because that trend continued unchanged after the democratic transition. So if democracy actually has some effect on economic performance, it's not strong enough to overcome broader trends. Which makes sense if you consider that authoritarians like making money, too, so blocking obvious productivity improvements would only be shooting themselves in the foot.