I don't recall Korea being raped, pillaged, enslaved for thousands of years, so, um, yeah. They fared the introduction and assimilation of Confucianism, Buddhism and Protestantism, created their own writing system, have their own creation myths, their own literature... I mean, China, sure, they got screwed by the Opium Wars, Boxer Rebellion and unfair foreign treaties in the late 19th century. But Korea? Beyond Japan's suzerainty in the late 19th/early 20th, they mostly just existed.
As for economics, from the 1970s on, the chaebol helped then hindered their economy. The corporate desire to have a finger in every pie meant that corporations had "diverse interests", with the same company having building and construction, TV manufacture, and white goods. This was great initially, but led to companies collapsing under their own weight. Debt to equity ratios were staggeringly high (1900% was not an uncommon figure), which could only be sustained for so long. The South Korean government assisted the chaebol up to the point where it was financially unfeasible to do so, and was as much to do with competing with the North as anything else.
(Slightly ranty, but I took 3 modules that were Korean related at university - literature, religion and business - under two excellent professors, so it irks to have misinformation just posted randomly)