Seeing that his passenger is a foreigner, taxi driver Lee Hong-soo asks what's becoming a common question here: "Which do you like better -- South Korea, China or Japan?" It's something a visitor gets asked over and over in South Korea. It used to be average people and government officials in South Korea asked what you thought of their country -- its people, food, weather and mountains. These days the curiosity is over its role in Asia, if not the world.
If ever there were a time for South Korea to think about its emergence on the world stage, this is it. More than ever, Seoul is thinking about its place in world and what it can do to contribute to the global economy. This is hardly the first time the nation has grappled with such questions. But tectonic shifts taking place in Asia also are forcing the issue.
"We've come a long way since the Asian crisis," Kim Yong-duk, South Korea's deputy finance minister, tells Bloomberg News. "Now, the question is how far Korea has come, where it's going and where it stands in the world."
Japan is in perpetual recession. China, meanwhile, will be a dominant player someday, but for now it's a Communist nation without an international currency or financial transparency.
Against that backdrop, South Korea's importance is rising, both economically and geopolitically. It's happening slowly, but it's occurring nonetheless.
South Korea's rise has much to do with its economy, which is expected to grow 5.7 percent this year. No longer is the country grappling with problems associated with an emerging-market nation; rather, its issues are shared by the 30 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Rather than focusing on hardware issues, such as financial systems, capital flows and infrastructure, South Korea is now grappling with software concerns -- demographic trends, pension-fund reform and restructuring health care. While still struggling, the nation is now doing so in the same economic neighborhood as Japan and, more and more, Europe and the US.
In this way, South Korea may be the closest thing the emerging-economy world has to a model of reform. To be sure, the nation has a long way to go to raise per-capita income and strengthen its economy. But in the four years since South Korean officials began restructuring the economy, they've done far more right than their peers.
The last time developed-world policy makers felt they had a genuine success story was Mexico in the mid-1990s. When Asia-Pacific leaders met in Vancouver in 1997 -- at the height of the Asian crisis -- then-Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo found himself holding court. It was his own experience with crisis in 1994 that Asian leaders wanted to hear about.
South Korea, however, has offered a much better example of how to rebuild an economy. "When I travel, I get lots of questions about how we handled our challenges and lots of suggestions that we should share them with other countries," says Kim, the deputy finance minister.
If there's a key to South Korea's 12-step program for economic revival, it's owning up to the underlying problems. While nations such as Japan remain in denial about the magnitude of their challenges, South Korea four years ago came to grips with its own.
After South Korea went into freefall, President Kim Dae-jung came under extreme pressure to close the economy. Everyone from taxi drivers to chief executives blamed fleeing foreign investors for crashing their financial system.
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