United States of America

On 1 April 2007 Korea and the United States finally completed their year-long negotiations to conclude the Korea- U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA), which was then signed by the…

President Lee Myung-bak won a landslide victory in 2007. His popularity before the election was obvious, and it came as a surprise to almost no one that he won by…

The world can only hope the recent U.S.-North Korean bilateral discussions will revive the six-power talks and lead to Pyongyang’s renunciation of its nuclear weapons ambitions. Hope, however, is not…

This paper builds on Kiyota and Stern (2007), in which we analyzed the economic effects of a U.S.-Korea free trade agreement (KORUSFTA). In Section II, we review the objectives and…

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.