In the 2012 elections in South Korea, Park Geun-hye, as a presidential candidate, pledged to rebuild the middle class and increase its size to 70% of South Korean society. It turned out to be an effective political strategy that greatly contributed to her election. In many Asian economies, economic polarization has become an important issue and it has its impact on the political debate.It is to be recalled that South Korean economy was severely affected by the Asian financial crisis in 1997. The majority of the working population and many middle-class people lost their livelihoods due to layoffs, early retirements and business failures. But,a small elite group with financial resources utilized the adverse conditions of credit-scarce market and benefitted with the connivance of ruling elites in the government. For the past two decades, the policies were framed to further the interests of the corporate financial groups and for their capital and profit accumulation. One could see this development in all Asian countries for the past two decades. Among all such neoliberal initiatives of the governments, the privatization of public services contributed to the fast growth of the financial assets of top-level corporate groups.The growing inequality in Asian societies is strongly connected with an economic initiative, the privatization at all levels of industry, agriculuture and service sectors. The announcements of the Ministers and Prime Ministers about the privatization measures are the regular new-items in the media.The public services, which were under state patronage for a longtime, have been privatized in all countries. In many countries in Asia, the governments are vigorously pursuing privatization in the service sectors like water, electricity, education, health etc. They were steadily handed over to private corporate groups, causing gloominess in the lives of working population and the poor. The people were affected by the increases in service charges, rate-hikes and were denied access to water, electriticity and other basic necessities.Over the last two decades, the water lobby companies were using water resources for their profit-pursuit while peoples’ movements have been defending ‘the human right’ of the common people to have access to water resources.Public water and sanitation management have actually disappeared from the field of state governance. The UN bodies, major bilateral agencies like EU, OECD, multilateral banks like IMF, African Development Bank are all promoting that mixed management models such as Private-Public-Partnerships. They recommend privatized management as a panacea for the water crisis.The several corporations in the field of water resources have gained a lot from the water projects undertaken by the World Bank. Two of the Bank’s most often cited “success” stories were in Manila, Philippines, and Nagpur, India. But in both cases real beneficiaries were not the people but the companies like Veolia.Read More.Source: Populist.Com/N. Gunasekaran