United States of America

Although the Korean Peninsula has been divided for over 70 years, North and South have not been able to make lasting progress in terms of reconciliation. While there are multiple…

Why is South Korea pilot-testing its Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), and what made it shift from non-issuance to consideration? This paper investigates the Bank of Korea (BOK)’s CBDC-related developments…

This paper deals with one of the most critical issues in contemporary international relations: how China’s rise challenges foreign policies of U.S. allies, with a focus on the Republic of…

By Robert R. King BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) has just released an excellent report on the trafficking of North Korean defectors:  “The North Korean women who had to escape twice” by BBC Korea editor Su-Min Hwang.  The report gives first-hand details of North Korean defectors in China who were trafficked and provides an account of…

By Juni Kim At approximately 7:20 a.m. on January 2nd, a minor 2.8 magnitude earthquake was detected by seismologists close to the Punggye-ri nuclear test site in North Korea. Although the last nuclear test occurred in September 2017, Woo Nam-cheol, the Korean Meteorological Administration’s geological analyst in South Korea, attributed the quake to the after-effects…

By Troy Stangarone If 2017 was the year of “fire and fury,” 2018 saw the United States and North Korea turn from the rhetoric of war to diplomacy as U.S. President Donald Trump met North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-un at the first ever U.S.-North Korea summit in Singapore. If 2018 was the year the diplomacy…

By Yonho Kim North Korea’s transportation system traditionally centered around the railway, as Kim Il-sung, the founder of the communist state, stated: “Railways are the arteries of the country.” However, with the economic crisis in the 1990s, the railway system was no longer able to properly function due to a lack of energy and deterioration…

Please join KEI and KIEP for a discussion about the first 10 years of KORUS and the future of the U.S.-Korea economic relationship.