2004 Posts located
On February 25, Lee Myung-bak was sworn in as the President of the Republic of Korea. In front of a crowd of some 60,000 gathered, including U.S. Secretary of State…
Korea is a tough economic competitor. Its meteoric rise over just 30 years from one of the poorest in the world to the ranks of the OECD helped earn Korea…
On December 19, the voters of South Korea elected Lee Myung-bak, the previous mayor of Seoul and a former business executive, to be the next president. The candidate of the…
Anyone who has spent time in the bustling streets of Seoul is familiar with the scene: commuters crowding into Daewoo buses, while salary men hurry home in their Hyundai sedans…
Strategically located at the crossroads of Central Asia, China, and Russia, Mongolia has long attracted the attention of regional powers – including the Koreas. How is this traditionally-nomadic, but resource-rich,…
Though hesitant to officially join the U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategy, South Korea is seeking to promote many of the same values through the Moon administration’s “New Southern Policy.” Central to this…
The U.S. Peace Corps was active in South Korea between 1961 and 1981. One of the many volunteers who served in South Korea was KEI president and CEO Kathleen Stephens.…
This month, the world was reminded once again that the relationship between the Republic of Korea and Japan is deeply fractious. Japan has imposed restrictions on the export of chemical…
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…