This paper examines talks on exchange rate reform between the U.S. and the ROK during the Eisenhower Era (1953–1961). The ROK achieved rapid economic growth through an export-oriented industrialization strategy from the early 1960s onward. Exchange rate reform was a factor in enabling the ROK to begin export-oriented economic growth.
The 1980s witnessed a reinvigoration of empirical research on ROK politics in the 1950s, yet this research was based on normative thinking that the ROK should achieve an ‘independent national economy’ with a ‘self-sufficient reproduction system’. As a result, it judged the 1950s negatively on account of the perception that this period had increased the subordination of the ROK’s economy to the U.S. and Japan. However, as such empirical research began to amass during the 1990s the question of continuity between the periods before and after the start of export-oriented growth garnered much attention. Arguments that witnessed continuity were primarily based on the critical stance that demanded that the process of the formation of initial conditions of export-oriented growth in the 1950s must be taken into consideration in order to explain which factors enabled the ROK to begin rapid economic growth from the 1960s onward. This paper shares this critical stance, and takes an historical approach and focuses on talks surrounding exchange rate reform between the U.S. and the ROK. By analyzing documents produced by both governments, it attempts to shed light on the process of the formation of the initial conditions.
In August 1955, the U.S. agreed to adopt a fixed-term fixed exchange rate with the ROK that overestimated the value of the ROK’s local currency in return for the ROK’s pursuance of policies to stabilize prices. Thereafter the US depended on the ROK’s economic development, as a result of which, they recognized a unitary exchange rate to be indispensable. However, since the U.S. valued incentives to institute policies for price stabilization within the ROK’s existing exchange rate system, they did not immediately attempt to carry out exchange rate. In 1959, however, pressure from congress forced the Eisenhower administration to demand exchange rate reforms from the ROK, and in February 1961, the ROK unified plural exchange rates to a single rate and adopted a floating rate system. This paper argues that it was these changes and experiences within U.S. policy that affected the exchange rate reform in the mid-1960s when export-oriented growth started.
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