Comparing Structural Change in South Korea and Colombia: A Case of “Varieties of Cronyism”

The concept of embeddedness autonomy was developed by Evans (1985) to explain how the make-up of nation states can influence industrial transformation. In this paper we highlight a further feature of this debate which we argue needs to be incorporated more clearly, and has to do with the relationship between state and the conglomerates. In both the countries we look at, South Korea and Colombia, the latter were conceived as the engines of industrial transformation, but the results were very different. We call this relationship “corporate crony capitalism”. We sustain that the relationship between the state and these conglomerates is a fundamental explanatory factor that explains the success of South Korea and lack of success of Colombia. We use a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) methodology to test this, that was originally developed by Ragin (1987, 2000, 2006).