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In RealTime posts, PIIE senior staff and colleagues discuss the fast-moving economic news, financial developments, and public policy choices confronting the United States and the world.
While in Korea and Japan several weeks ago, sparks flared not only over the Senkakus/Diaoyu/Diaoyutai Islands and Dokdo/Takeshima but the highly emotional issue of comfort women. As a result, we are about to have one of those quasi-natural experiments that social scientists love. Will history and politics trump economics? Or will growing interdependence pull the [...]
North Korea executed its highly anticipated missile launch and with its failure managed to achieve the second worst outcome imaginable. (The worst would have been hitting China.) The North Koreans have managed in a single stroke to not only defy the UN Security Council, the United States, and even their patron China, but also demonstrate [...]
Sanctions are a complex technology with correspondingly complex macro- and microeconomic as well as political effects. Iran is currently facing quite draconian oil-related sanctions, most notably the EU decision in January 2012, to wind down purchases of Iranian crude oil by July 1, 2012. But the country has also been hit by a wave of [...]
In the wake of the death of Kim Jong-il, there were questions as to whether anyone was in charge in Pyongyang. Now we know that someone is capable of making decisions and their first one constitutes a conciliatory (indeed, concessionary), not belligerent, gesture. The agreement does not completely freeze the North Korean nuclear program but [...]
Setting aside Syria, South Korea may be the only country in the world with politics more polarized than the United States. While in Seoul last week I was reminded of this when the leaders of the political opposition attempted to march on the US embassy to deliver letters addressed to President Obama and Vice President [...]