Contract Migration as Economic Development Strategy: The Philippines and South Korea

Suzy Lee, Binghamton University, State University of New York (SUNY)

In this article, I examine the relationship of the modern-day contract labor regime to the economic development agendas of sending states by comparing the policy regimes of South Korea and the Philippines. Both countries – South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s and the Philippines over a longer period beginning in the 1970s – implemented economic development strategies that yoked contract migration to the growth of national industries. By examining the mechanisms through which contract laborers were connected to the national economy, I find that these countries represent two different models through which economic growth and migration can be connected: direct and indirect. The indirect model, where remittances are leveraged to catalyze investment and growth – describes the Philippines’ current dependence on migrant remittances to buttress the sectors that drive the country’s recent growth: real estate and construction, retail, and banking. The direct model, deployed by South Korea in the 1970s, is thus called because it more directly connected the national development project to migrant workers. While remittances may have had some impact on growth, the greatest impact of these workers was not through the funds they remitted, but the competitive edge they gave to the Korean construction firms that were attempting to gain a foothold in international markets at the time. As part of the national development project, the Korean state implemented policies to ensure that this labor was plentiful, cheap, and equipped with skills that matched the needs of the region. I argue that these models – direct and indirect – are connected to different strategies for economic development. Korea used the direct model to help it catalyze an industrialization-based, high-employment, high-growth economic transformation. In the Philippines case, the indirect model has produced less dramatic, if steady, growth, characterized by persistent un- and under-employment.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 196. Postcolonial Development: Legacies and Strategies