Abstract
The paper shows that between the late 1980s and 1997, the year when Korea was engulfed in a financial crisis, its corporate-sector profitability was on a decreasing trend, albeit short-term ups and downs. The evidence presented in the paper suggests that Korea’s corporate and financial sectors had been highly vulnerable to a crisis for some years before 1997 and the actual timing of the crisis was triggered by the financial crisis in Thailand in July 1997 and its contagion effect.