Asia

In recent years, North Korea has faced economic shocks from UN sanctions and the pandemic. As Dr. Jongkyu Lee (Senior Fellow at the Korea Development Institute) writes in his new…

Following a record number of North Korean missile launches, as well as tests by South Korea, assertions have been widely and uncritically made that Seoul is participating in an inter-Korean…

Although the Korean Peninsula has been divided for over 70 years, North and South have not been able to make lasting progress in terms of reconciliation. While there are multiple…

Why is South Korea pilot-testing its Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), and what made it shift from non-issuance to consideration? This paper investigates the Bank of Korea (BOK)’s CBDC-related developments…

In 2010, a group of Asian countries made major strides toward economic integration with the launch of the Chang Mai Initiative Multilateralization. This currency swap arrangement has had a major…

With the recent season finale of The Walking Dead and the broadcast of his visit to South Korea with talk show host Conan O'Brien this past weekend, we look back at our…

This week our guest is noted scholar and North Korea watcher Dr. Stephan Haggard. Dr. Haggard is a Professor of Korea-Pacific Studies and director of the Korea-Pacific Program at the…

At KEI, we mainly focus on the relationship between the United States and South Korea, and their approaches toward North Korea. This week, we're taking a different look at the…

By Christopher Hurst Recent headlines around the world have highlighted the growth of refugees worldwide. There have been calls from the UN for the rich nations of the world to step up and help take in many of these people fleeing war and persecution from places in the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia. In…

By Nayoon Lee Two seemingly unrelated events point to a larger problem in Korea. In 2011, a prosecutor was caught for accepting a Mercedes Benz and a Chanel bag from the opposing lawyer. The lawyer and the prosecutor asserted that they were in a relationship, and the court decided the prosecutor was not guilty. What…

By Min Tae Chung South Korea is well known for its rapid economic growth with its post- Korean War development. Early in South Korea’s economic development, also known as “the miracle of the Han River,” the economy underwent constant and rapid growth that has elevated South Korea’s economy to the heights of one of the…

By Troy Stangarone North Korea and South Korea are different, but sometimes it takes a crisis in each country to draw those differences out. In many ways, the flooding in North Korea in September and the recent crisis at Samsung help to illustrate how different the two countries have become since they were divided after…