Apples & Oranges: How Ghana's Political Economy Truly Compares with South Korea, and Brazil

This paper calls for a reexamination of the standard literature why Korea successfully used foreign aid while its peers continue to be aid dependent. My focus is on Ghana, Brazil, and South Korea, - the most representative examples of countries which used foreign assistance, had similar per capita gross domestic product (GDP) in the early 1960s, but which end up differently sixty years later. Salutary scholarship to South Korea's leapfrog industrialization and democracy between 1962-1980 is mainstream. Much of these unfairly presume my focus countries had identical aid flows to industrialize. This qualitative paper reappraises the key building blocks of Korea's successful development transition to clarify Ghana's growth collapse and Brazil's delayed ascent. The paper considers the weighty broader implications of America's Cold War policy objectives in addressing the replicability of the Korean "miracle" to other countries.