Where does South Korea stand on Building?
This page reads one capability from the published data and is recomputed with every release. It separates what South Korea does, which makes the score, from what the country has, which sits beside the score, and places the country among the 10 countries at the nearest income. The text describes the data and recommends no policy.
What does the score rest on?
The Building score is the equal-weight mean of the positions of four indicators on a 0 to 100 scale that every country sets together. Confidence measures the evidence behind the score and sits beside it as a second number.
The Building score tracks GDP per capita at r = 0.57 across 123 countries.
Observed indicators
- Position on the scale80.9Peer median26.810 peers with a value
Manufacturing value added
27.4 % of GDP
World Bank (NV.IND.MANF.ZS), 2025
- Position on the scale59.4Peer median29.510 peers with a value
High-technology exports
36.3 % of manufactured exports
World Bank (TX.VAL.TECH.MF.ZS), 2024
- Position on the scale100.0Peer median78.910 peers with a value
Electricity connection speed
100 score 0-100
World Bank (IC.ELC.TIME.DFRN), 2019
- Position on the scale100.0Peer median83.810 peers with a value
Economic fitness
3.7 index
World Bank (EF.EFM.UNIV.XD), 2024
No comparable source yet, so lowering confidence: large project delivery and firm scale-up rate.
What South Korea has to work with
Beside each condition, two r values read every country at once, one against income and one against the capability score. Where the r with income is much higher than the r with the score, having the condition goes with being rich more than with the capability measured.
Conditions, not scored
What the country has to work with on this capability. The values are shown as the source published them and are not part of the score, the confidence or the trend. The rank counts the countries with a value, best first.
Output per workerWorld Bank (SL.GDP.PCAP.EM.KD), 2025
99,046 constant 2021 PPP $, rank 24 of 123. GDP per person employed, constant purchasing power parity.
A condition, not scored: output per worker is income per worker, the wealth the benchmark tests capability against, so it is published beside Building as context (D122).
- r with income: 0.88 (123 countries)
- r with the Building score: 0.6 (123 countries)
- Peer median: 114,073 constant 2021 PPP $ (10 peers with a value)
Where does South Korea sit among its peers?
The peers are the 10 countries at the nearest income. Income is GDP per capita at purchasing power parity, in constant international dollars, for the latest year the World Bank publishes, and distance is measured on a log scale, where half and double are equally far. No country is picked by hand, and the set changes when the data does.
In this release peer income runs from US$ 49,292 to US$ 62,824, and South Korea has US$ 55,697 (2025).
- Solid ring: usable or good evidence
- Broken ring: thin evidence, opening further as confidence falls
- The shaded band is the middle half of the set and the line inside it is the median.
- South Korea: 85.1
- Germany: 68.8
- United Kingdom: 62.8
- France: 61.9
- Italy: 59.4
- Czechia: 53.6
- Spain: 49.8
- Canada: 44.7
- Finland: 41.0
- Australia: 39.5
- Cyprus: 22.4
What separates South Korea from its peers?
South Korea scores 85.1 on Building, above the median of the 10 scored peers, which is 51.7.
Indicators placed above the peer median on the scale: manufacturing value added, high-technology exports, electricity connection speed, and economic fitness.
South Korea has less than the peer median of output per worker.
Each sentence compares one position with one median. Why a difference exists, and what to do about it, lie outside this data.
What this reading does not show
- A national score is a coarse proxy. A capability forms in firms, cities, networks and groups below the level of the country, and a national average only describes the conditions they work in.
- Peers share income and nothing else. Size, production structure, region and political regime are outside the rule, and a set of 10 countries can change with any revision to GDP.
- An r reads the whole set at once and says nothing about one country alone. A correlation does not show a cause either.
- The known artefacts that bear on Building, described on the limits page: artefact A6, artefact A11.
- And the ones every score in the benchmark carries: artefact A8, artefact A10.