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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.
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.
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.
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.
"In describing their comprehensive proposal for negotiations with North Korea, O'Hanlon and Mochizuki exhibit the strategic creativity and analytical depth badly needed by United States policy makers dealing with this strange, dangerous place." --Ash Carter, former Assistant Secretary of Defense and Ford Foundation Professor of Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University IN EARLY 2002, in his fateful state of the union address, President Bush described North Korea as being a member of the "Axis of Evil." Since then, the U.S. has gone to war with Iraq, and the world now wonders what the future of Bush's preemption policy will bring. Many of the nation's top experts feel that North Korea is a more imminent threat than Saddam's Iraq was. They have a nuclear program, a million-man army, and missiles to deploy and export. In Crisis on the Korean Peninsula, Michael O'Hanlon, a Senior Fellow at Brooking and visiting lecturer at Princeton, and Mike Mochizuki, endowed chair in Japan-US Relations at G.W. University, not only examine this issue in detail but also offer a comprehensive blueprint for diffusing the crisis with North Korea. Their solution comes in the form of a "grand bargain" with North Korea. Accords could be negotiated step-by-step, however they need to be guided by a broad and ambitious vision that addresses not only the nuclear issue but also the conventional forces on the hyper-militarized peninsula and the ongoing decline of the North Korean economy.
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.
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.
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 world economy fell into a global financial crisis in 2008/9 and is still jittered by its aftershocks. Like other financial crises happened in the world economy, it came as a surprise. In historical perspective, financial crises should be understood as a natural fact of life in the world economy and a more pertinent question that should be posed would be why people so easily forget and do not learn from the historical experience. This book deals with the question in two ways. First, it investigates the frame of mind that distances people from the reality of life. At the heart of it, it argues that there are wrong perceptions on the working of the world economy, in particular, the international financial market. It summarizes them as ‘the five conventional wisdoms’ in the international financial market and, by critically examining them, it draws on ‘the five financial theorems’, which would provide intellectual pillars for a more realistic understanding of the global financial market. Second, the book examines in detail the case of an emerging market economy that fell into a financial crisis twice in the recent decade. South Korea provides us with an interesting case of emerging market financial crises that came as ‘surprises’: it faced a financial crisis in 1997/98 after it had been acclaimed as one of ‘East Asian miracle economies’ and it was again befallen to a crisis during the global financial crisis in 2008/2009 after it was widely regarded as a country that had recovered from the crisis with one of the most successful implementations of the IMF-sponsored reforms. The book attempts to provide the readers with a realistic understanding of emerging market financial crises by interpreting the recent global financial crisis and the Korean crises with some general concepts manifested in ‘the five financial theorems’. It also tries to draw more general implications for policy management of emerging market economies.
The 1997 South Korean financial crisis not only shook the country itself but also sent shock waves through the financial world at large. This impressive book critically assesses the conventional wisdom surrounding the Korean crisis and the performance of the IMF-sponsored reform programme.Looking first at the strengths and weaknesses of 'Korea Inc.