1933 Posts located
Much is made in Western circles of North Korea’s economic dependence on China amid questions of whether and how much leverage this gives Beijing. In an end game, however, Pyongyang…
Russia shares a border with the Korean Peninsula, and its declared interest is to maintain peace and stability in the region. During Soviet times, its Korean policy was based on…
On February 10, 2016, the South Korean government announced the closure of the Gaeseong Industrial Complex, a symbol of its engagement policy and inter-Korean rapprochement. The move was part of…
Lately, many questions have been raised about how new currents are reshaping the economic architecture in East Asia, ranging from the Russian Far East to the Indian sub-continent with narrower…
Although it is happening more rapidly in South Korea, an aging society is a common feature in post-industrial societies around the world. With the number of retirees growing and the…
In March, Seoul suffered from the worst air pollution on record. Enough that the South Korean government has officially designated the problem as a "social disaster." But what is causing…
Over the past few years, Korea and Koreans have experienced incredible political, social, and diplomatic shifts. It is hard keeping up with all these new developments as a Korea Watcher,…
Even before the meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong-un in Hanoi, foreign policy practitioners and observers were talking about the difficulties of sequencing international sanctions relief for North Korea…
Last Thursday, Korean chipmaker SK Hynix made history by developing a 10-nanometer (nm) transistor process for 16 GB Double Data Rate 5 (DDR5), the latest iteration of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips. By allowing for greater memory capacity and processing speeds for the corresponding central processing units (CPUs) that are used for cloud computation, this…
“You can either buy clothes or buy pictures.” (Gertrude Stein) The air will be filled with a different kind of buzz in Seoul this week as it hosts the third annual international art fair, Frieze Seoul. Over 110 leading art galleries worldwide will assemble for four days at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in…
The public sector financed 76 percent of healthcare in OECD countries in 2021 using compulsory health insurance and government programs (Figure 1, Panel A). Korea is an outlier in this regard, as only 62.3 percent of its health expenditures were covered through mandatory financing schemes. The low share of mandatory financing in Korea was offset…
The overwhelming majority of refugees who flee North Korea are generally those who live in border areas adjacent to China and do not have prominent government or economic positions. Few are from Pyongyang because it is very difficult for citizens to travel within the country unless police and internal security officials approve the travel. Meanwhile,…