South Korea Wants to Graduate From Emerging Markets

South Korea is reviving a longstanding push to be upgraded to a developed market by MSCI Inc., a change that could pull in more than $40 billion in foreign capital.

As an emerging market, South Korea ranks alongside countries such as Colombia, Egypt and the Philippines. That jars in a wealthy country that nowadays boasts the world’s 10th-largest economy, a $2.3 trillion stock market, high-tech heavyweights such as Samsung Electronics Co., and global soft power thanks to cultural exports like the Netflix series “Squid Game” and K-pop group BTS.