Yes. Just one problem: Rocket Man. Remove this diminutive despot and everything is solved, everything. Reunification in less than two years. Trump and Mad Dog Mattis are on this, rest assured.
Bookmarked.
It’s a toss up.
Japan’s economy has been in the dumpster for many years. We sell the oil to them from Alaska coming out of Valdez so they can refine it and sell it back to us for a profit. Among other things, this is one of their saving graces.
A recent paper by Suk Lee of the Korea Development Institute, a South Korean government think-tank, puts a new spin on this approach. It estimates North Korea’s national income by comparing the share of its households that use solid fuels for cooking with that in other lower-income countries. The data, as reported by the North Korean census show that nearly 93% of households lack access to gas or electricity and rely on firewood or coal. Assuming the numbers bear some relation to reality, they put North Korea in line with countries such as Uganda and Haiti, and suggest that North Korea’s purchasing-power-adjusted income per person was somewhere between $948 and $1,361. They have made some strides since the 1990 famine, but not in household or people improvements. Mainly in jobs like shops and taxis. So, without the tourist trade, they are in the can.
rwood
The answer is no. Japan has far more people.
I’m thinking that North Korea’s economy might shrink a tad!
I don’t think Japan has anything to worry about, except for the fallout that might result when rocket man gets nuked. Will take years to rebuild Korea.
“The hardest-working people I’ve ever seen.”
For sure. And, talk about Tiger Mom’s. Korean Moms can write the book on this.
Korea has unfair trade practices. They can dump cars and machine tools in to th US at a loss and the government pays companies the difference.
Japan was NOT Asia's most important regional power
Japan was a closed off hermit state off the mainland that most of East Asia forgot about until 1843 -- they did cause some troubles every few centuries by attacking Korea, but that was it
In fact in 1700 to 1843 the most important Asian powers were:
$40B trade deficit will help also. Another country raping the US consumer market and hiding behind the USA’s military.
South Korea will always get a bigger per-capita share of business in the largest Asian domestic market, China, compared to Japan. That is due to fail-to-die World War II sentiments, that both China and South Korea keep stoked up for their own domestic nationalist promotion agendas (as in “see, we are still standing up to Japan”), while the only thing Japan seeks is good trade.
I think reunification after the North fails - one way or another - will be very costly for South Korea, but it was also very costly for Germany, but they remain the largest and one of the best performing economies in Europe. South Korea will equally weather the storm of reunification and come out even stronger than before.
What do I think Japan should do? Short of becoming the 52nd U.S. state, with which Japanese are free to move to the other 51 states, and any U.S. citizen can move to Japan, greatly enhancing the U.S. domestic economy and gradually introducing broad changes in Japan, I have no recommendations for Japan.
Domestically Japan has a ton of internal social harmony, but a set in stone political and corporate structure that won’t budge, producing no new ideas on governance and mere repetition of what hasn’t worked for thirty years. They still export immensely, while the domestic economy remains on hold.
Maybe the Japanese just need to start having lots of kids.