Asia

After two years of sluggish growth, the Korean economy is now recovering. Economic activity began to revive in the early part of 2005 and accelerated throughout the year, reaching an…

The Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA) and the Korea-European Union Free Trade Agreement (Korea-EU FTA) are the major FTAs for the Korean economy. Although both FTAs share many similarities,…

This study was undertaken to assess possible futures for the North Korean regime and the Korean peninsula that could affect U.S. and regional interests, and to consider which U.S. and…

This article is aimed at analyzing, in a comparative perspective, the economic reforms undertaken by Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) and Cuba since the demise of…

  When Marja Vongerichten was 19, she met her birth mother for the first time since being adopted at age three. The first thing they bonded over, Marja says, was…

Born in Brooklyn, Chef Edward Lee always loved cooking. And after graduating from college with an English literature degree, he returned to that love and became an award-winning chef. Not…

In the decades following the Korean War, North Korea initiated a top-secret project to kidnap ordinary people from Japan, reeducate them, and turn them into international spies for the regime.…

Every year on January 13, the Korea Economic Institute of America (KEI) sponsors a luncheon in Washington, DC to mark Korean American Day and recognize the local and national Korean…

North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly, the country’s parliament, adopted the government budget for the new year at its session February 6-7.  The budget law was approved with a pledge to develop the economy and improve the people’s wellbeing despite the “persevering struggle” against international sanctions and the COVID pandemic. A particularly noteworthy aspect of the…

This post was revised on August 21 , 2023 to reflect additional research by the authors. Additional analysis can be found in authors' article Political Polarization in Korea. Korea’s democracy is clearly a success story. Along with Taiwan, it is one of the few Asian countries that transitioned to democratic rule in the 1980s and…

One of the most prominent policy and social problems plaguing the Republic of Korea today is a declining birth rate. The nation fell below the replacement fertility rate of 2.1 in 1983 and rested at 0.84 at the end of 2020. This sustained decline has negative implications for economic growth in the long run as…

As 2021 began, the world was still in the depths of the pandemic and vaccines to protect against COVID-19 were only beginning to become available to the public in a small number of countries. As 2022 begins, the pandemic continues to impact lives and economies around the world but there are signs of recovery. Among…