I'm reading a little book by Bob Hope about his various USO travels. Here's his description of South Korea in the mid-1950s.

Korea is a bleak, unyielding country saddled with grinding poverty. The destructiveness of the war is everywhere in evidence. And yet the uneasy truce, although bringing an end to the hostilities, is hardly less cruel, since it separates the predominantly industrial North from the barely subsisting agricultrual South. People live in caves and mud huts, gathering scraps of wood to get through the night. Trees are a rare luxury.

Today, South Korea's per capita income is $17,800 compared with North Korea's $1,300 per person. (Source: CIA World Factbook).