The Chile-South Korea Economic Cooperation Committee: public-private partnership, a solution against uncertainty

Abstract

This essay studies the constitution of the Chile-South Korea Economic Cooperation Committee (1979), in a complex context for the world economy, due to the oil crisis and the foreign debt crisis in Latin America; and for Chile's international relations, due to the wide isolation of the civil-military government of the time, and to the profound transformations in the entrepreneurial role of the State in Chile, which implied the privatization of many state-owned companies. In the same period and year, South Korea was going through a very critical scenario, in which the assassination of the head of state, Park Chung-hee was the main event. We propose, as a general hypothesis, that despite the adverse scenario of those years, a very successful bilateral relationship was developed, which constituted the basis of relations between the two countries since then and up to the present. This hypothesis puts pressure on those versions that until now now have described this type of link as “unlikely”. For the preparation of this article we examined specialized bibliography, documentation from the Historical Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Chile, as well as the archives of the business organizations mentioned.

This work was supported by the Seed Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the Korean Studies Promotion Service (KSPS) of the Academy of Korean Studies N°: AKS-2018-INC-2230001; Titled: "Korea and Chile International Relations: Political, Economic and Cultural Communication, 1990-2017". Además, está patrocinado por la Universidad de Santiago de Chile y financiado por el Fondecyt Regular Regular Nº 1200168 (ANID), titulado "Chile y Corea del Sur, 1973-1989: Vidas paralelas y convergencias secreta".