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In recent years, the financial statecraft literature has expanded from a focus on great powers to encompass the behavior of emerging powers. While offering an important corrective, the literature does not yet adequately address the full variety of the emerging powers' strategies of financial statecraft. In particular, we argue that regional middle powers behave differently from regional great powers even when they have similar capacities at the global level. For instance, both India and South Korea are categorized as emerging powers in the financial statecraft literature and deploy regional strategies to reduce their financial vulnerability. Yet their financial statecraft strategies have clearly differed in practice. India has sought to challenge the global status quo and influence its neighbors, while South Korea has pursued more modest and defensive goals. Drawing on the middle power literature, we posit that middle powers' relative position within their home regions explains such differences among the financial statecraft of emerging powers. To demonstrate the utility of this approach, we examine South Korea's financial statecraft in the Asia-Pacific region. We find that its position as a regional middle power effectively explains its patterns of bilateral and regional cooperation in the monetary sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial liberalization has noticeably reduced the role of the state in effectively influencing the economy in post-developmental states. Yet many studies have found that the legacies of the developmental model continue to influence the policies, institutions, and socioeconomic challenges that are faced by the states that previously adopted the model. These studies, however, do not clearly identify when and how such legacies may be manifested in state behavior. This paper contributes to filling this gap in the literature by arguing that financial crises can serve as a trigger to more clearly reveal the structural evidence of the legacy in institutions that were previously established and utilized for developmental objectives. By conducting a rigorous case analysis using historical and market data on the crisis responses of South Korea's public pension fund, this paper finds that South Korea's developmental legacy remains passively embedded in the governance structure of the pension fund in non-crisis times but manifests during financial crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]