The Bank of Korea flags Dutch disease as chips take 40% of the country's export book

Two reported numbers carry the whole argument, and they can be turned into a third. A doubling of chip exports that ends at roughly 40% of the total implies total exports of five times the base-period chip figure and non-chip exports of three times it, so the rest of Korea's export book grew only if semiconductors had already been more than a quarter of it a year earlier (at exactly a doubling; a larger multiple pulls that threshold slightly below 25%) ^[1]. Neither document supplies the earlier share, so the crowding-out claim stays conditional, which is the honest form of it.

Where the two warnings differ matters more than the fact that they agree. The Bank of Korea's report describes production factors piling into one industry and eroding the foundations of the others ^[3]. Asahi's column describes an industry that buys much of its manufacturing equipment abroad and therefore passes relatively little demand to domestic production and employment ^[7]. Those are not the same complaint. Imported tooling is simply a low domestic multiplier: it fails to help carmakers and steelmakers ^[11], but it takes nothing from them. Factor concentration does take something, and it is the version you cannot legislate away without making chipmaking less attractive, because the thing pulling engineers and capital in is the return itself ^[8].

This is probably wrong in one direction or the other, but the view I would hold is that the allocation is doing what returns tell it to do, and the exposure worth pricing is duration rather than competitiveness: profits described as unprecedented and the bonuses paid out of them ^[6] are a single-period cash flow, and households, provinces and tax forecasts have a habit of spending single-period cash flows as though they were annuities. The counter-thesis deserves stating in the same breath. The Dutch precedent is a loss of manufacturing competitiveness after gas exports expanded ^[4], which is a claim about where factors went, while the disparity Asahi raises between large and small firms and between the capital region and the provinces ^[9] is distributional. Bundling the two makes the case louder and harder to test, and the call for long-term and steady policy that the column ends on ^[10] is a request to hold labour and capital in lower-return uses, which someone has to fund.

What would make the concentration thesis testable rather than merely plausible is that earlier share: below roughly a quarter, and the non-chip book contracted in absolute terms in the same half that chips set a record; above it, both grew and there was nothing to crowd out ^[1]. Two companies have the profits, the central bank has the mechanism, and the base-period share of exports is the number I would go and find first.