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During recent decades, Korea has been one of only a handful of countries that have made the successful transformation to become a developed nation by simultaneously achieving persistent economic growth combined with a democratic political system. Experts and political leaders worldwide have attributed this achievement to investments in people or, in other words, the power of education. Whilst numerous books have highlighted the role of industrial policies, technological growth, and international trade in Korea’s development process, this is one of the first to focus on the role of human capital. It shows how the accumulation of human capital aided transformation and helps explain the policies, strategies and challenges that Korea faces now and in the future.

Despite the world-highest expenditure in R&D as a percentage of GDP, there is a rising concern that Korean researchers in universities and government-funded research institutes (GRIs) are contributing neither to creating new opportunities for the economy nor to solving big societal challenges. Based on the international comparison of academic papers, patents and technology transfers, this paper shows Korea’s poor performance in high-risk high-payoff research. We also point out that the root cause of such low performance in high-risk high-payoff research is a heavy-handed control over research communities by bureaucrats in ministries. This paper suggests several reform agendas for removing excessive bureaucratic controls and strengthening the autonomy of the funding and project agencies, GRIs, and research universities.

This paper proposes a new conceptual framework of “education bubble” in analyzing the human capital investment and formation. We apply this concept to the Korean experience. Sixty years ago Korea was destitute not only of income but also of all sorts of education, but now it is one of the leading countries in educational attainment as well as in other conventional measures of human capital investment indices such as the PISA tests and the number of researchers. We argue, however, that such phenomenal expansion of these quantitative measures involved the problems of enormous burden of private tutoring and the mass production of low-quality higher education institutions, which did not contribute to increasing the effective unit of human capital particularly since the 1990s. We find that despite rapid increase in private educational expenditure for college entrance, the college wage premiums for the bottom two decile groups of 4-year college graduates and the bottom half of 2-year college graduates are both negative. This striking evidence from the microeconomic data suggests that such phenomenal expansion in aggregate quantity of human capital indices of Korea could be a bubble. We learn from this evidence that the quantitative expansion of education may not be good enough for sustainable development, which would guide the design of human capital policy not only for Korea but also for other developing countries.

In this paper, a wideband circularly polarized (CP) microstrip antenna with capacitively coupled feed is presented. There is a pair of slits and two pairs of truncated corners on the patch. A metallic disk connected to a 50Ω SMA connector is placed below the patch. Simulation results show that the return loss is below −10dB and the BW is 34.2% from 1.84GHz to 2.60GHz. The CP center frequency is 2.35GHz with a CP BW of 8.51%. Good right-hand CP radiation is observed and the gain is about 8.0dB at 2.35GHz. The only metal of the proposed antenna is aluminum and it has the advantage of easy fabrication and low cost.