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The financial panic of late 2008 and the global economic recession that followed has been the greatest economic shock since World War II. While North Asia was caught up in…
East Asia is an area where real economic activities are closely linked. The brisk trade in goods and services among East Asian countries shows a well-integrated East Asian economy. Most…
A common problem facing students of the economy of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is the shortage of available statistics. It is extremely challenging to procure DPRK data,…
In the wake of the fall of Lehman Brothers, in the fourth quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009 Korea was faced with its biggest economic challenge since…
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…
On August 31, 2021, South Korea’s National Assembly approved the amendments to the Telecommunications Business Act (전기통신사업법), which essentially imposes new restrictions and mechanisms of greater regulatory scrutiny over the operators of app markets (e.g., Apple’s ‘AppStore’ or Google’s ‘Play Store’). Hailed as the first successfully implemented measure against the giants operating global app markets,…
In the last two posts, we have provided data on the share of military personnel in the Politburo and analyzed in more detail the diversity of military backgrounds, some tied to the weapons program, but others linked more clearly to the military-industrial complex, technology and internal security. Here, we consider several intepretations of these developments,…
South Korea’s dominant position in the global market for auto manufacturing and chip fabrication are well known. Less well-known is the country’s increasingly expanding gaming industry. In 2019, South Korea’s gaming industry brought in USD 6.9 billion from abroad - approximately 10 times that of the country’s vaunted pop music industry. Now, Korea’s gaming companies are looking…
In a previous post, we provided data on the shifting composition of the Politburo, based on a classification of personnel into six different career paths: military, diplomatic, party, state, economic and provincial. We showed that since the failed Hanoi summit of 2018, the share of military personnel has returned to levels not seen since the…