Asia

This paper assesses the potential for South Korea to be a regional leader in advancing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing, and supporting sustainable development in the Asia-Pacific region. Many…

South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s New Southern Policy (NSP)—the most recent effort by Seoul to boost relations with Southeast Asian countries and India and diversify its relationships beyond four major…

This paper addresses the U.S.-South Korea alliance in the context of Asia’s evolving security architecture. At the crux of the issue is the Biden administration’s desire to uphold the rules-based…

This paper examines South Korea’s foreign policy towards China before, during, and after the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense dispute to investigate the limits of South Korea’s…

2018 has been an incredibly eventful year for both the Koreas and the U.S.-Korea relationship: from North Korea’s participation in the Winter Olympics at the start of the year to…

Interest in the Korean peninsula is generally very narrow in the United States – it tends to be focused on North Korea and security issues, particularly the country's ballistic and…

Last Friday, on November 30, 2018, President George H.W. Bush passed away. In the days that followed, there were many discussions in the foreign policy community about the late president's…

What does a unified Korea look like? Beyond the question of whether the government of this new country will be a unitary or federal one, how will the people –…

The Yalu River floods have receded, but Kim Jong-un might still feel underwater. The North Korean won has fallen nearly in half against the US dollar in informal markets this month and similarly against the Chinese yuan, as reliably reported by Daily NK and Asia Press. This development suggests inflation is on the way in…

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…