Chaebol General Motors and Renault. The chaebol debts were not only to state industrial banks but also to independent banks and their own financial services subsidiaries. The scale of the loan defaults meant that banks could neither foreclose nor write off bad loans without themselves collapsing, so the failure to service these debts quickly caused a systemic banking crisis, and South Korea turned to the IMF for assistance. The most spectacular example came in mid-1999, with the collapse of the Daewoo Group, which had some US$80 billion in unpaid debt. At the time, it was the largest corporate bankruptcy in history.
Poverty in South Korea number of adults that have the mindset of caring for their parents has gone down from 90% to 37%. Poverty in Korea is affecting mostly the elderly: nearly a half of the elderly live in relative poverty, which is the highest proportion among OECD countries. OECD listed several factors among the reasons for poverty in Korea. First, public social spending in South Korea is low. Social spending by the government in South Korea was 7.6% of GDP in 2007, compared to the OECD average of 19%. This can be explained by the Korean traditional reliance on family and the private