The dramatic success of the export-oriented industrialization strategy of the East Asian countries based on inexpensive labor enabled these countries to rapidly attain the status of newly industrializing countries (NICs). The assessment of the potential of these countries to move from the semi-periphery to the core of the capitalist world economy depends on assembling empirical evidence at both the level of within-country and that of across- countries. With this evidence the nature and extent of expansionism of core transnational corporations (TNCs) of a given industry can be estimated and utilized to facilitate disentanglement of the complex patterns of the industrial mobility of NICs in the world economic system. This doctoral dissertation project will make a cross-country inter-industry comparison by comparing Korea with Latin American cases over the last three decades and a within-industry comparison by studying the divergent market strategies toward transnational corporations that the three Korean automobile manufacturers--Hyundai, Daewoo, and Kia--took in order to provide a solid empirical foundation for explicating the global functioning of transnational corporations and the impact that they have had on the Korean automobile industry. Statistical and historical data from the Korean automobile manufacturers and government agencies with be combined with data from interviews with engineers, economists and managers at the auto companies and with auto experts and economic and social historians in order to illuminate the developmental process. This project will contribute to social scientific understandings of the paradoxical relationship between dependency and development and of the process of industrialization from a world system perspective. This project also will provide an excellent opportunity for a promising young scholar to continue to develop independent research skills.
