Russia's economy is roughly the size of South Korea's, and barely a 20th the size of America's.
Although none was jailed, the government said the amnesty was necessary because the businessmen needed to be cleared of their criminal records in order to help South Korea recover from a slowing of its economy.
The benchmarks are dominated by very mature sectors of the economy with two-thirds all in the BRICs, South Korea and Taiwan and about half of that in the energy, materials and financials sectors.
The building blocks of a modern economy--bridges, roads, power lines--are at about the level of South Korea a quarter century ago, according to the Construction and Economic Research Institute of South Korea.
Just as South Korea's economy is something of a half-way house, so is its democracy.
According to a study in 2005 by Michael Enright, Edith Scott and Ka-mun Chang, if the area, including Hong Kong and Macau, were a separate country, it would be the world's 18th-largest economy and its 11th-biggest exporter, ahead of South Korea and India.
At one point its economy grew faster than that of any other big country bar Japan and South Korea.
But tourism was one of the rare bright spots for South Korea's economy last year, when exports fell 1.3%, their first decline since 2009.
The launch is a culmination of years of efforts by South Korea Asia's fourth-largest economy to advance its space program and cement its standing as a technology powerhouse whose semiconductors, smartphones and automobiles command global demand.
It isn't rare in South Korea, where family-owned chaebol dominate its economy, to see company owners convicted of white collar crimes being granted presidential pardons.
But such forward thinking has transformed South Korea from one of the poorest countries in Asia to an advanced high-tech economy that's home to major tech firms like Samsung and LG, as well as the most wired population on the planet.
South Korea, the world's tenth-largest economy, was effectively bankrupted by the withdrawal of Japanese money, he says.
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