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Mention the name “Lothar de Maiziere” in most conversations and one will elicit blank stares. But de Maiziere, who visited Seoul in November, is actually one of contemporary history’s more interesting personages. He was elected to the parliament as a Christian Democrat in East Germany’s only free election, served as Prime Minister for 5 months, and [...]
Following the death of Kim Jong Il, it seems that “collapsism” is in retreat. The tightly-scripted transition has not revealed any obvious hitches so far, and we are on the record with our doubts about collapse scenarios. Nonetheless, it is still early and the possibility remains that the outside world might have to respond to [...]
Recently, the Washington Post reported on how the younger South Korean generation is increasingly being disaffected by the idea of national unification, and how the Ministry of Unification (MOU) has been trying to fight against this trend. This led us to poke into what the MOU is doing, and we found that they are not [...]
On a roundtable at the American Political Science Association, Dave Kang outlined some of the results of a multi-year project on reunification he has been leading with Victor Cha. We have expressed our doubts about the prospects for sudden political change. Even were the country to collapse—whatever that means–the extraordinary costs of reunification are likely [...]
Standard models of the costs of unification suggest that the amount of investment needed to raise North Korean per capita incomes to 60% of the South Korean level, are in excess of $1 trillion, or roughly equal to South Korea’s annual national income. (In comparison, the clean-up costs of the 1997-98 financial crisis were about [...]
We were recently asked about the competing DP and GNP human rights bills; voila. Jaesung Ryu reports from Seoul on the current state of play: Legislation regarding a South Korean version of the US North Korean Human Rights Act has been deadlocked since its initial introduction to the National Assembly by a GNP representative in [...]
Earlier I wrote a piece on the rising costs of unification. According to Yonhap, the South Korean government continues to putter away on its “unification tax” proposal. Maybe we should import some National Assembly members to serve in the House of Representatives… It never ends: South Korea’s Maeil Business news is reporting that 35 million [...]
A particular genre of North Korea speculation considers what unification might look like. In addition to the inevitable “scenario”-style work are some efforts to calculate the costs of unification, to which we have contributed. But the post-transition dynamics will be deeply political as well as economic. How will North Koreans view the past in a [...]
The issue of the “costs” of unification is a hardy perennial that never goes out of style. The topic has attracted more attention lately with concerns over North Korea’s growing internal and external stresses and its looming succession, all of which might contribute to political instability, and in the extreme, regime collapse and disappearance of [...]
Following the death of Kim Jong Il, it seems that “collapsism” is in retreat. The tightly-scripted transition has not revealed any obvious hitches so far, and we are on the record with our doubts about collapse scenarios. Nonetheless, it is still early and the possibility remains that the outside world might have to respond to [...]
