South Korea is an economic miracle. Back in 1985 I ran out of money half-way through college and enlisted in the US Army for the college fund (plus they repaid my existing student loans, which was a nice deal). I got stationed in S. Korea and became friends with a number of KATUSA soldiers. KATUSA stood for Korean Augmentation to the US Army, and was mostly college students fulfilling their service requirement.
Quite a few of my KATUSA friends were engineering students like myself. They told me that the average starting salary for an engineer was $400 / month. So when I see that 25 years later, the average factory worker is making 5 times that amount, it's truly stunning.
As a side note, when I was there, most of the cars on the road were new. It wasn't because everyone could afford to ditch their old cars and buy new ones. It was because prior to that period, not many people could to afford to buy any car, so there simply weren't many old ones.
And their products were crap. Buy a TV, VCR, or other electronic device, and they often failed out of the box. Pop open the hood of a Korean car and you half expected to see a squirrel on a tread mill. But they keep plugging away, improving quality, and growing their markets. Today, I buy Korean products with confidence.
People talks about the rise of China, but to me, with factory salaries at $2000/month, South Korea is the more impressive success story in the developing world.