Globalization of Arms Production and Hierarchical Market Economies: Explaining the Transformation of the South Korean Defense Industry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The global arms industry has experienced a major transformation in the post-Cold War era, with production becoming increasingly transnational and larger in scale. While many scholars and policymakers predicted the widespread adoption of market-enhancing reforms aimed at increasing domestic competition and attracting FDI, globalization of arms production has not led to a convergence of national defense industries into a liberal- market model. Drawing on the varieties of capitalism (VoC) literature, recent scholarship has demonstrated how an interdependent web of economic institutions has shaped each country's response in varied ways. This paper builds on the VoC literature and argues that the hierarchical market economy (HME) as a distinct variety serves as a better model for understanding the trajectory of defense industries in many second-tier producers that do not fit the existing categories of VoC. We conduct an in-depth case study of South Korea's defense-industry reform initiated in 2008 and the subsequent threefold increase in its arms exports. We show that the trajectory of South Korea's defense-industry reform can be seen as the result of an HME's attempt to adapt to the globalization of arms production in ways that preserve its distinct comparative advantage. As the HME model has broad applicability for many countries in Asia and Latin America, our findings have important implications for future developments in the global arms industry.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".