Asia

As the reigning consensus has it, the U.S.-ROK alliance is one of the most successful of its kind in history. The alliance not only succeeded in defending South Korea from…

The history of the first of North Korea’s nuclear proliferation crises has received considerable attention and analysis. The regional implications of a nuclear North Korea were signaled clearly and repeatedly…

The North Korean Nuclear Program and Peace Process: Past, Present, and Future

Economic relations between North Korea and South Korea broke major new ground in 2005. Inter-Korean trade increased by more than 50 percent over the previous year and exceeded $1 billion…

In this episode, Korea Economic Institute’s Director of Communications Chad 0Carroll speaks with Scott Snyder of the Council on Foreign Relations. Having written a number of publications on U.S. relations…

In this episode, Korea Economic Institute’s Director of Public Affairs and Regional Issues Sarah Yun speaks with Dr. Andrei Lankov of Kookimin University. Having written a number of books on…

In this episode, new Korean Kontext presenter speaks with Curtis Melvin, the man behind the NK Econ Watch blog and developer of “North Korea Uncovered”, a Google Map overlay that…

In this episode, we speak with Kevin O’Donnell, who, after decades on a private sector career path, became the first-ever Peace Corps country director for South Korea, followed by a…

In the last two posts on Korea and the war in Ukraine, I showed that Moon administration moved relatively quickly to join the international sanctions regime and was rewarded by inclusion on Russia’s  "unfriendly nations" list. I also argued that the costs of standing on international legal principle were softened by the fact that the…

The OECD Economic Outlook, released on June 8th, projected that real GDP growth in OECD countries would drop by half from 5.5% in 2021 to 2.7% in 2022. The new projection is a sharp reduction from its December 2021 Outlook, which projected growth of 4.5% growth this year. With inflation expected to rise from 3.7%…

Over the last half decade, the Korean Peninsula has seen the prospect of war during Donald Trump’s period of “fire and fury,” but also a period of negotiations that resulted in a series of North-South and U.S.-North Korea summits. While war was avoided, those efforts at negotiation ultimately failed. The aftermath of those failed negotiations,…

After more than two years since the start of the pandemic, COVID-19 has finally been detected in North Korea. Despite strict border controls limiting the movement of people and goods to prevent entry of the novel coronavirus, state media reported on 12 May that the Omicron BA.2 variant had been found in a sample taken…