Unification: Burden or Opportunity?

By Troy Stangarone

Troy Stangarone is the Senior Director for Congressional Affairs and Trade at the Korea Economic Institute of America.

While the end of the Cold War brought the reunification of East and West Germany, the Korean Peninsula has remained divided over the ensuing quarter century. For much of that time, Korean unification has been viewed through the lens of the economic costs of German unification, but in 2014, South Korean President Park Geun-hye in Dresden suggested that unification need not be a cost to bear but rather could be a potential economic “bonanza” for the two Koreas.

President Park is not alone in seeing a significant economic upside in Korean unification. A unified Korea would create a market of nearly 75 million people in an economy that Goldman Sachs has estimated has the potential to be larger than Germany and Japan’s by the middle of the century.

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