Davos Newbies

Jeff Garten has a devastating piece in today’s Financial Times (subscribers only) on the farce of Russia taking leadership of the G8 after Britain’s chairmanship.

If ever there were a travesty of leadership by example, this is it. Two trends are changing the world for the better – freer markets and democrat­isation. Is it too much to expect that the G8 should stand for both? But, alone among the summit members, Russia is moving in the opposite direction of what is desirable. Moscow’s leadership of the G8 reduces the credibility and the relevance of the group to zero. It also makes a mockery of the Bush administration’s push for democratic, market-oriented societies around the world. Putting Russia in charge of the G8 is akin to the United Nations having allowed Sudan and Liberia to play big roles in its UN Human Rights Commission – a move that resulted in the irrelevance of the commission and a subsequent plan for radical reorganisation.

Many surprising things have emerged from Korea in recent years. There’s Oh My News, the world’s highest penetration of broadband and a successful national football team.

But I certainly didn’t know that Korea had become a powerful player in Asian popular culture.

South Korea, historically more worried about fending off cultural domination by China and Japan than spreading its own culture abroad, is emerging as the pop culture leader of Asia. From well-packaged television dramas to slick movies, from pop music to online games, South Korean companies and stars are increasingly defining what the disparate people in East Asia watch, listen to and play.

The size of South Korea’s entertainment industry, which began attracting heavy government investment only in the late 1990’s, jumped from $8.5 billion in 1999 to $43.5 billion in 2003. In 2003, South Korea exported $650 million in cultural products; the amount was so insignificant before 1998 that the government could not provide figures.

The New York Times article concentrates on the impact this is having on Taiwan. Korean television shows now are more popular than Japanese ones, and tourism to Korea has surged. Economists have long discussed how countries migrate up from domestic industries, to low-value export manufacturing, to high-value manufacturing. Making the leap to export of culture is probably the last step in the chain. It could well be more significant than having a Samsung flat-panel television.