Crisis in Korea

Crisis in Korea
Author: Tim Beal
Publisher: Pluto Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011-09-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780745331621

The South Korean warship Cheonan was sunk in mysterious circumstances on March 26, 2010. The remarkable events that followed are analyzed by Tim Beal and woven into a larger study of the increasingly volatile relations between North and South Korea and US concern about the rise of China. South Korea's stance towards the North has hardened significantly since the new conservative government came to power. Beal argues that the South moved quickly to use the sinking of the Cheonan to put international pressure on the North, even before the cause of the sinking had been established. The United States followed suit by attempting to pressure China into condemning North Korea. The media reports at the time presented an open and shut case of unprovoked North Korean aggression, but the evidence points towards the accidental triggering of a South Korean mine as the cause and South Korean fabrication to incriminate the North. With the South bent on forcing the fall of the North's regime with US help and China unlikely to stand idly by, this book offers an essential guide to the key factors behind the crisis and possible solutions.

North Korea/South Korea

North Korea/South Korea
Author: John Feffer
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2003-09-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781583226032

The Korean peninsula, divided for more than fifty years, is stuck in a time warp. Millions of troops face one another along the Demilitarized Zone separating communist North Korea and capitalist South Korea. In the early 1990s and again in 2002-2003, the United States and its allies have gone to the brink of war with North Korea. Misinterpretations and misunderstandings are fueling the crisis. "There is no country of comparable significance concerning which so many people are ignorant," American anthropologist Cornelius Osgood said of Korea some time ago. This ignorance may soon have fatal consequences. North Korea, South Korea is a short, accessible book about the history and political complexites of the Korean peninsula, one that explores practical alternatives to the current US policy: alternatives that build on the remarkable and historic path of reconciliation that North and South embarked on in the 1990s and that point the way to eventual reunification.

The Korean Financial Crisis of 1997

The Korean Financial Crisis of 1997
Author: Kyu-sŏng Yi
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 480
Release: 2011
Genre: Financial crises
ISBN:

This book chronicles how Korea dealt with and overcame the crisis over time. The book is organized into eleven chapters. Chapter one outlines the troubling financial market conditions at home and abroad before the crisis. Chapter two then delves into the origin of the crisis and offers analyses on the shortcomings of the Korean economy and the instability of the international financial system. In chapter three, policy measures the government executed in the wake of the onset of the crisis are described and analyzed. Chapter four probes the steps taken to reduce the risk of sovereign insolvency in the face of the cool market reaction to the initial package of crisis response measures announced by the International Monetary Fund in December 1997. Chapter five describes the background within which the government established the institutional framework necessary for corporate, financial, and labor market restructuring between December 1997 and April 1998. The government efforts to secure additional foreign currency liquidity through the markets and to devise initiatives to counter the massive unemployment are discussed in detail. In chapter six, the situation during May and June 1998 is explored with a focus on the closure of nonviable corporate and financial companies and the efforts to drive down interest rates and revive credit flows. This is followed, in chapter seven, by an analysis of the first phase of financial sector restructuring, which started in the third quarter of 1998, and the measures adopted to shore up potential growth and cope with the pressing problem of unemployment. Chapters eight and nine deal separately with the restructuring of the top five chaebols (the large family-controlled and family-run groups that dominate business in Korea), the economic stimulus packages applied during the fourth quarter of 1998, the efforts to restore financial market stability and economic growth, and the initial phase of foreign exchange liberalization measures, which were implemented during the first half of 1999. Chapter ten then discusses the situation during the second half of 1999, with a particular focus on the collapse of the Daewoo business group, including the steps taken to contain the resulting fallout, as well as measures aimed at expanding the economic recovery. Chapter eleven, the final chapter, offers a diagnosis of the Korean economy, along with an analysis of the policy implications and the responses for the future.

The Korean Financial Crisis of 1997—A Strategy of Financial Sector Reform

The Korean Financial Crisis of 1997—A Strategy of Financial Sector Reform
Author: Mr.Angel J. Ubide
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 67
Release: 1999-03-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1451844646

After years of strong performance, Korea’s economy entered a crisis in 1997, owing largely to structural problems in its financial and corporate sectors. These problems emerged in the second half of that year, when the capital inflows that had helped finance Korea’s growth were reversed, as foreign investors—reeling from losses in other Southeast Asian economies—decided to reduce their exposure to Korea. This paper focuses on the sources of the crisis that originated in the financial sector, the measures taken to deal with it, and the evolution of key banking and financial variables in its aftermath.

South Koreans in the Debt Crisis

South Koreans in the Debt Crisis
Author: Jesook Song
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2009-08-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822390825

South Koreans in the Debt Crisis is a detailed examination of the logic underlying the neoliberal welfare state that South Korea created in response to the devastating Asian Debt Crisis (1997–2001). Jesook Song argues that while the government proclaimed that it would guarantee all South Koreans a minimum standard of living, it prioritized assisting those citizens perceived as embodying the neoliberal ideals of employability, flexibility, and self-sufficiency. Song demonstrates that the government was not alone in drawing distinctions between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor. Progressive intellectuals, activists, and organizations also participated in the neoliberal reform project. Song traces the circulation of neoliberal concepts throughout South Korean society, among government officials, the media, intellectuals, NGO members, and educated underemployed people working in public works programs. She analyzes the embrace of partnerships between NGOs and the government, the frequent invocation of a pervasive decline in family values, the resurrection of conservative gender norms and practices, and the promotion of entrepreneurship as the key to survival. Drawing on her experience during the crisis as an employee in a public works program in Seoul, Song provides an ethnographic assessment of the efforts of the state and civilians to regulate social insecurity, instability, and inequality through assistance programs. She focuses specifically on efforts to help two populations deemed worthy of state subsidies: the “IMF homeless,” people temporarily homeless but considered employable, and the “new intellectuals,” young adults who had become professionally redundant during the crisis but had the high-tech skills necessary to lead a transformed post-crisis South Korea.

Korean Crisis

Korean Crisis
Author: Donald Kirk
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2001-04-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780312239992

Donald Kirk explores the origins and effects of Korea’s economic crisis. He traces the events that constituted the crisis, including a series of scandals at the height of the Korean miracle; the efforts of President Kim Dae Jung to curb the overweening po

Economic Crisis and Corporate Restructuring in Korea

Economic Crisis and Corporate Restructuring in Korea
Author: Stephan Haggard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2003-02-26
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780521823630

Asian business conglomerates have clearly been successful agents of growth, mobilizing capital, borrowing technology from abroad and spearheading Asia's exports. However, these firms have long had a number of organisational and financial weaknesses, including heavy reliance on debt, that make them vulnerable to shocks. Nowhere was this more true than in Korea, where the large corporate groups known as chaebol have dominated the economic landscape. This collection of essays by leading political scientists and economists provides a comprehensive look at the chaebol problem in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. The authors consider the historical evolution of the chaebol and their contribution to the onset of economic turmoil in 1997. The book analyses the government's short-run response to corporate and financial distress, and outlines an agenda for longer-term reform of the financial system, corporate governance and the politics of business-government relations.

Crisis in North Korea

Crisis in North Korea
Author: Andrei Lankov
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2007-05-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0824832078

North Korea remains the most mysterious of all Communist countries. The acute shortage of available sources has made it a difficult subject of scholarship. Through his access to Soviet archival material made available only a decade ago, contemporary North Korean press accounts, and personal interviews, Andrei Lankov presents for the first time a detailed look at one of the turning points in North Korean history: the country’s unsuccessful attempts to de-Stalinize in the mid-1950s. He demonstrates that, contrary to common perception, North Korea was not a realm of undisturbed Stalinism; Kim Il Sung had to deal with a reformist opposition that was weak but present nevertheless. Lankov traces the impact of Soviet reforms on North Korea, placing them in the context of contemporaneous political crises in Poland and Hungary. He documents the dissent among various social groups (intellectuals, students, party cadres) and their attempts to oust Kim in the unsuccessful "August plot" of 1956. His reconstruction of the Peng-Mikoyan visit of that year—the most dramatic Sino-Soviet intervention into Pyongyang politics—shows how it helped bring an end to purges of the opposition. The purges, however, resumed in less than a year as Kim skillfully began to distance himself from both Moscow and Beijing. The final chapters of this fascinating and revealing study deal with events of the late 1950s that eventually led to Kim’s version of "national Stalinism." Lankov unearths data that, for the first time, allows us to estimate the scale and character of North Korea’s Great Purge. Meticulously researched and cogently argued, Crisis in North Korea is a must-read for students and scholars of Korea and anyone interested in political leadership and personality cults, regime transition, and communist politics.

The causes of the IMF crisis in South Korea. What Experts Say

The causes of the IMF crisis in South Korea. What Experts Say
Author: Juhyuk Park
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Total Pages: 28
Release: 2021-02-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3346342395

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Economics - Finance, grade: A, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, course: Advanced Macroeconomics, language: English, abstract: What had happened to Korea, and why did the nation have to face the IMF crisis in 1997 all of a sudden? To see what the causes for the crisis were, analyses from six essays of scholars and experts in the field of economics will be introduced and compared. While they have similar and different views for the causes at the same time, their views can be grouped into two categories: internal factors and external factors. When the Korean currency crisis broke out, the IMF and many scholars focused the whole crisis on Korea’s internal problems. However, there are many other scholars who attribute the causes not only to internal but also to external problems. The experts who see the causes as internal problems think the crisis originated from internal factors of Korea such as policy mistakes, highly leveraged corporate sectors, and banking system. The external factors refer to the external shocks such as contagion effect from South-east financial crisis and appreciation of Japanese yen. Although all the causes for the crisis are closely related with each other, addressing the causes separately would give people better understanding of the context. On Nov. 1997, Korea faced the IMF crisis, or also known as the financial crisis, which caused severe damage to the Korean economy. The new OECD member was reduced from being the world’s eleventh largest economy to an economy surviving on overnight loans from the international money markets. The won, the Korean currency, fell by more than 50 percent against the US dollar. Also, KOSPI (the Korea Composite Stock Price Index) fell by thirty percent, and the short-term interest rate shot up to forty percent per year. Consequently, on Dec. 1997, Korea called the IMF for rescue, owing $58.3 billion of financial aid. As shown in table 1 and 2 in the appendix 1, Korea had performed continual rapid GDP growth at the rate of 7.8 percent per year in average from 1960 to 1997.