Since the success of economic development in South Korea, there has been a volume of studies to explain economy of development in the Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs) The dominant theoretical framework among them is state-led development approach, which argues that the government or state agencies play the manager role in private sector decision-making as well as intervene in market transactions to obtain national development. However, this statist approach has been heavily criticized because of its role in leading to corruption. In this paper, we investigated what caused financial crisis in South Korean and analyzed how the statist approach and political corruption played a role in it. The analysis leads us to conclude that eliminating political corruption would be critical to recover from the crisis and to prevent another economic crisis in the future.