Asia

Economic relations between Korea and the United States reached new heights in the year 2006 with the launch of negotiations for a bilateral free trade agreement. While the negotiations were…

Rapid economic development lifted Korea’s per capita income from 15 percent of the U.S. level in 1970 to approximately half by 2005. Growth has been based primarily on inputs of…

The insatiable appetites of banks, insurance companies, pensions, endowments, and high-net-worth individuals make enormous capital possible for private equity funds. The private equity market has become an important source of…

The importance of having an efficient labor market is growing because of recent trends such as globalization, the development of information-communication technology (ICT), and the increasing need for foreign direct…

In this episode, Korean Kontext speaks with Ms. Jie-ae Sohn, President of Arirang TV & Radio, Korea’s first English language international broadcast system. Ms. Sohn worked as the former CNN…

Preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons has emerged to be one of the key foreign policy priorities of the Obama administration. Despite efforts among Western powers to form a united…

By the time you read this, the KORUS FTA will have entered the implementation stage. To celebrate, Korean Kontext caught up with two of the main movers-and-shakers behind the deal…

This episode of Korean Kontext has a distinctly British flavor, featuring interviews with two leading Ambassador’s that work closely on UK and Korea related affairs. While recently in London, Korean…

There is a long tradition of considering North Korean leaders’ public appearances as a potential source of information on the regime’s priorities (see for example: Haggard, Herman, and Ryu; Pyo and Hur; Kim and Lee).  We now have ten full years of this data for Kim Jong-un through the South Korea Ministry of Unification portal,…

The U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations held a hearing on April 7 to question President Joseph Biden’s nominee for U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, Ambassador Philip S. Goldberg.  Goldberg is one of four ambassadorial nominees who testified before the Foreign Relations Committee on April 7.  Two of the four nominees, including Goldberg, are senior…

In the 2022 presidential election, the conservative opposition candidate Yoon Suk-yeol won the race with a 0.8% margin. During the campaign, Yoon received endorsements from five former senior military officers who had served in the Moon administration. They attributed the endorsement to “[their] faith in Yoon’s national security policies,” including his controversial remark that Seoul…

A specter is haunting the Korean Peninsula — the specter of nuclear proliferation. On the campaign trail, conservative candidate Yoon Suk-yeol said he would consult with Washington over redeploying tactical nuclear weapons. Although the president-elect has not officially changed Korea's stance on nuclear weapons, his comments are part of a larger trend of Korean leaders…