South Korea’s various regional development initiatives have struggled to build regional hubs with enough productivity and economic density to counter the capital region’s self-reinforcing advantages.

That helps explain why decades of relocation and redistribution have produced limited gains, and why the Lee Jae Myung administration’s “five mega-regions and three special regions” (5+3) growth strategy will depend on whether regional growth engines can become sufficiently concentrated to sustain themselves.

The imbalance has proved durable. More than half of South Koreans now live in the capital region, which covers about 12% of the country’s territory, while the flow toward Seoul,