South Korea
Profile written September 2026 · figures updated nightly
Where things stand
The latest published reading for each measure, with the last five years beside it.
01Structure
South Korea is the most concentrated advanced manufacturing economy on this site. Semiconductors alone account for something between fifteen and twenty per cent of exports, and a single group, Samsung, for roughly a fifth of them.1 Shipbuilding, vehicles, petrochemicals, steel, batteries and consumer electronics make up most of the rest.
The organising structure is the chaebol: large family-controlled conglomerates that carried the industrialisation from the 1960s onward and still dominate output, exports and research spending. The advantage is the ability to commit capital to twenty-year semiconductor and shipbuilding cycles; the cost is an economy in which a handful of boardroom decisions set the national growth rate.
That concentration makes Korean output a leveraged bet on the global electronics cycle — which is why Korean growth swings more widely than that of any other high-income economy here.
02Trade and exposure
Trade amounts to roughly eighty-five per cent of GDP.1 The two largest partners are China and the United States, and the position between them is the central strategic problem: Korean firms sell components into Chinese assembly and finished goods into the American market, so decoupling between those two economies pulls Korean supply chains apart rather than towards either side.
American trade policy has become an active constraint. Korean steel enters under a tariff-rate quota, above which a fifty per cent tariff applies, and Korean electric-vehicle batteries carry a ten per cent tariff while remaining exempt from the surcharges applied to Chinese cells.2 Korea's trade surplus with the United States narrowed in 2025 as exports there fell and exports to China rose — a regional reorientation that was not chosen.
03Energy and resources
South Korea imports more than ninety per cent of its energy,3 one of the highest dependencies in the world, and has essentially no domestic fossil resources. It is among the largest LNG importers globally, drawing on Australia, Qatar, Malaysia, the United States and Oman.3
Nuclear power is the answer to that exposure and the most contested part of Korean energy policy. It supplies close to a third of electricity, the largest single source, and the 2026 transition plan keeps it near that share to 2030 while raising renewables and cutting coal.4 For an economy whose comparative advantage is energy-intensive fabrication, the price of electricity is an industrial policy variable, not just an environmental one.
04Labour and demography
South Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the developed world, around 0.72 births per woman,1 far below the level any pension or labour-force projection was built on. The working-age population has begun to shrink and will shrink faster, and no advanced economy has attempted to run an industrial base of this scale through a demographic contraction this steep.
The labour market is also unusually segmented: secure, well-paid employment in the conglomerates and their affiliates, against far weaker conditions in the supplier firms and in self-employment, where a large share of older workers end up.
05Public finances
Government debt is low by advanced-economy standards, which gives Korea more fiscal room than most of its peers and is regularly used for support packages when the export cycle turns.
The pressure is private and demographic. Household debt stands near one hundred per cent of GDP,1 among the highest ratios anywhere, most of it tied to housing, and it limits how much consumption can offset a weak export year. Behind that sits the pension arithmetic implied by the fertility rate in section 04.
06Money and prices
The Bank of Korea sets the rate shown above and targets two per cent inflation. The won floats, and it behaves like a risk-sensitive currency: it weakens when global electronics demand or Chinese growth disappoints, which cushions exporters and raises the cost of the energy imports described in section 03 at the same moment.
That combination — a terms-of-trade shock and a weaker currency arriving together — is the recurring difficulty of Korean monetary policy, and it constrains how far the central bank can ease into a downturn.
07What the models expect
These are computed on this site from each series' own history, and are nobody's official projection. The bar is the range the figure lands in half the time; the dot is the central path.
Replayed from past origins on today's revised figures, the same baseline was usually off by 0.47 on consumer price inflation, 1.14 on real gdp, 0.13 on unemployment rate, 0.22 on central bank policy rate.
08Structural indicators
The figures behind the sections above. They move by a point or two a year, so each carries the year it was measured.
| Measure | Value | Year | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Semiconductors, share of exports | 15–20% | 2026 | MOTIE / trade data |
| Trade, share of GDP | ~85% | 2024 | OECD |
| Energy imported | >90% | 2026 | EIA / Enerdata |
| Nuclear, share of electricity generation | ~31% | 2025 | Argus / MOTIE |
| Fertility rate | 0.72 | 2026 | OECD |
| Household debt, share of GDP | ~100% | 2026 | Bank of Korea |
09Sources and method
Live figures: OECD, Bank for International Settlements. Each is fetched nightly and validated before publication; the delivery report on /status/ says how old every one of them is. Profile written 2026-09-12, next review September 2027.
- Export concentration, the chaebol, trade openness, fertility and household debt — Coface, South Korea country file; Korea Economy 2026
- US tariffs on Korean steel and batteries, and the shift in trade shares — Korea Economic Institute of America
- Energy import dependence and LNG suppliers — US Energy Information Administration, South Korea
- Nuclear's share of generation and the 2030 target mix — Argus, South Korea's 2026 energy transition plan