South Korea

This article was published in The Korea Times on March 13, 2024. With Donald Trump set to be the Republican presidential nominee after a string of primary wins on March…

This article was published in The Diplomat on March 8, 2024. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the United States and its allies put in place an extensive set of sanctions to limit Moscow’s…

This article was published in East Asia Form on February 24, 2024. After expanding by 2.6 per cent in 2022, South Korea’s economy cooled in 2023. Waning global demand for South…

This article was published in The National Interest on January 30, 2024. The trends driving the U.S.-ROK alliance to enhance cooperation around extended deterrence and establish the Nuclear Consultative Group…

President Yoon Suk-yeol’s speech on the commemoration of Liberation Day outlined a revised unification vision based on the values of freedom and democracy. To this end, President Yoon committed to enhancing unification education for South Korean youths, raising North Koreans’ awareness of freedom, continuing humanitarian aid to North Korea, and establishing an inter-Korean working group.…

New economic analysis by Michael Clemens at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) challenges the prevailing narrative around South Korea’s demographic challenges. Once the fodder of wonky demographers and social scientists, South Korea’s population is now world-renowned for its extreme drop in birthrates and aging society, a topic I covered last year for KEI.…

Korea’s healthcare spending in 2000 was the lowest among the 38 OECD countries at less than 4 percent of GDP, reflecting the country’s relatively young population and the limited coverage of its National Health Insurance (NHI). However, adjusted for inflation, healthcare spending grew at an annual rate of 7.7 percent from 2000 to 2022, the…

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol offered a dramatically different vision of Korean unification in his Liberation Day speech on August 15, an annual observance in South Korea that marks the end of Japanese colonial rule over the Korean Peninsula. In his speech, President Yoon framed unification as completing the unfinished task of liberation and the…