Asia

China’s ideal outcome for North Korea is a Goldilocks state—one that is not so strong to challenge China or so weak that its implosion threatens Chinese interests. China’s multifaceted approach…

The six-party talks have been hindered by political shifts in the states involved, and especially by changing levels of support for the talks in Washington and Seoul. But the talks…

Even though inter-Korean economic cooperation has been growing steadily for the past two decades, the volume of inter-Korean trade is still small compared to the other emerging Asian economies’ trade…

North Korea badly needs change but whether that change can and should be induced or forced from the outside is open to question. This paper proceeds from the perspective that…

June 25, 2020 marks the 70th anniversary of the start of the Korean War. The conflict on the Korean Peninsula has been going on for so long that we sometimes…

2020 is starting off dramatically with the escalation of tensions in the Middle East – The world held its breath while the United States and Iran exchanged both blows and…

While it is frustrating to see North Korean projectiles flying out to sea and Pyongyang’s erratic, unpredictable reactions in negotiations, we cannot forget where things stood in 2017 – the…

30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, people’s aspiration to establish a pluralistic liberal democracy appears to be under scrutiny around the world – anti-immigration policies dominate political…

New economic analysis by Michael Clemens at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) challenges the prevailing narrative around South Korea’s demographic challenges. Once the fodder of wonky demographers and social scientists, South Korea’s population is now world-renowned for its extreme drop in birthrates and aging society, a topic I covered last year for KEI.…

Korea’s healthcare spending in 2000 was the lowest among the 38 OECD countries at less than 4 percent of GDP, reflecting the country’s relatively young population and the limited coverage of its National Health Insurance (NHI). However, adjusted for inflation, healthcare spending grew at an annual rate of 7.7 percent from 2000 to 2022, the…

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol offered a dramatically different vision of Korean unification in his Liberation Day speech on August 15, an annual observance in South Korea that marks the end of Japanese colonial rule over the Korean Peninsula. In his speech, President Yoon framed unification as completing the unfinished task of liberation and the…

The transformation of relations between South Korea and Japan during the past two-plus years is one of the signal accomplishments of the Yoon Suk-yeol administration. However, there remain doubts over the durability of this achievement. A troubling question remains whether the historical past of Japan’s colonial rule over Korea will again roil relations. The ongoing…