Asia

KEI’S SPECIAL PROJECT ON THE SOUTH KOREAN NUCLEAR ARMAMENT DEBATE South Korea’s nuclear armament debate received renewed attention in 2023. But, this issue is one that has animated Korean politics,…

In Korea, public institutions play a critical role in the national economy.  Korean public institutions not only provide public services to the market but also influence various private enterprises by…

South Korea aspires to achieve the status of a global vaccine hub as a national strategic policy priority. South Korea’s biomanufacturing industry has ramped up the development and production of…

In recent years, South Korea has been addressing climate change, including through investments in hydrogen, the Green New Deal, and international pledges to cut emissions by 40 percent from 2018…

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…

The OECD’s March Interim Economic Outlook projects that Korea’s real GDP will increase by 1.6% in 2023, matching the Bank of Korea’s February forecast. The new projection is a slight downward revision from the OECD’s November 2022 outlook in the context of below-trend global economic growth. The impact of the war in Ukraine and high…

The Tokyo summit that brought together South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on 23 March 2023 successfully cleared away much of the accumulated debris of the last five years of dysfunctionality. The two-day official visit — the first by a South Korean president in a dozen years — checked off…

I’m currently completing a book on North Korea watchers - the community of scholars, analysts, government officers, NGO advocates and journalists who, for one reason or another, commit a portion of their lives to watching North Korea. After twenty-five years in government, academia and consultancy, with much of my time working on Korean Peninsula affairs,…

Elizabeth Salmón, the recently-appointed UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, submitted her first report to the UN Human Rights Council on March 9.  The report is set to be discussed on March 20 as part of the Council’s broad human rights agenda in Geneva from…