2004 Posts located
On December 12 Jang Song-taek, largely considered the second most powerful man in North Korea and a well-known “China hand,” was executed for treason and corruption, leaving the Chinese government…
This paper examines the evolution of income inequality in South Korea over the period 1965 to 2011 using a fairly new dataset, namely the Standardized World Income Inequality Database (SWIID).…
This paper centers upon two potentially transformative Special Economic Zones (SEZs) on the DPRK’s northwestern frontier – Hwanggumpyeong and Wihwa Islands. As part of a strategy for development along North…
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…
By Joy Kim South Korea is currently the world’s 15th largest economy. This fact strikes many as amazing given that Korea’s Gross National Product (GNP) per capita increased by more than 243 times over the span of 50 years, from $82 in 1961 to $20,000 in 2006. The baby boom generation who were born in…
By Nicholas Hamisevicz The surprise news to start the week is that Vice Marshall Ri Yong Ho, chief of the general staff of North Korea’s army as well as a member of the Political Bureau and the Central Military Commission, was relieved of all his positions due to “illness.” During the last year of Kim…
By Chad 0'Carroll Chosun Ilbo columnist Kim Dae-joong wrote yesterday that because South Korea is surrounded by three nuclear weapons countries (DPRK, China and Russia), it should consider acquiring nuclear weapons. He argued that new laws passed in Japan meant that Tokyo “wants to develop nuclear weapons”, leaving the ROK as the only country in…
By Elizabeth Hervey Stephen In a recent piece in the Asia Sentinel, which was re-posted in The Irrawaddy, Philip Bowring correctly noted that South Korea is facing a population crisis with sustained low fertility in the range of 1.2 children per woman. As one solution to the birth dearth, he proposes looking toward reunification with North…