Asia

In recent years, North Korea has faced economic shocks from UN sanctions and the pandemic. As Dr. Jongkyu Lee (Senior Fellow at the Korea Development Institute) writes in his new…

Following a record number of North Korean missile launches, as well as tests by South Korea, assertions have been widely and uncritically made that Seoul is participating in an inter-Korean…

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…

Despite all the attention around the upcoming second summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, we in the United States still know very little about North Korea, its people, and…

As we approach the second US-DPRK Summit, the media in the United States is so focused on the dynamics between President Trump and Kim Jong-un that the interests and motivations…

When people talk about South Korea’s foreign policy, they are more often than not focused on how Seoul engages with its immediate neighbors on denuclearization. However, as a global trading…

Amid the maelstrom of the drama around diplomacy with North Korean, it’s easy to forget that South Korea and the United States are engaged in a fairly serious trade dispute…

For seventy years, one of the few things that North Korea, South Korea, and the United States agreed upon was the goal of reunifying the Korean Peninsula.  No more, at least for now.  During a January 2024 speech, Kim Jung-un announced, “The reunification of Korea can never be achieved with the Republic of Korea.” He…

Corruption has a significant negative effect on economic growth through its impact on investment, competition, entrepreneurship, government efficiency and human capital formation. It also has important implications for numerous indicators of economic development, such as environmental quality, personal health and safety, income distribution and social trust. Reducing corruption should be a top priority. Many studies…

Investment Announcements December 20, 2023 ­­– LG Chem begins construction on its cathode plant in Clarksville, Tennessee, set to begin production in 2026. The $1.4 billion injection as part of the construction is the first phase of its $3.2 billion investment plan delineated in an MOU LG Chem signed with the State of Tennessee in…

South Korea’s trade relations have undergone changes since the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, South Korea surpassed Japan and became China’s second-largest trading partner. However, its exports to China saw a decline of 20 percent in 2023, plummeting to $124.8 billion from $155.7 billion in 2022. Consequently, South Korea ran a trade deficit of $18 billion…