“Korea is well positioned to thrive”

Foreign Affairs (FA), a leading U.S. magazine on international relations, has hailed Korea as being, “one of the hot markets to watch over the next half decade,” in a recent article, “The Shape of Things to Come: Hot Markets to Watch,” from its January/February 2014 issue, published online on January 2.

The magazine chose Korea, along with Mexico, Poland, Turkey, Indonesia, the Philippines and the Mekong region, as, “up-and-comers whose combination of size, recent performance and economic potential will make them particularly interesting to watch and attractive to investors over the next half decade.”


Editor Gideon Rose and managing editor Jonathan Tepperman co-penned the article and analyzed that, “All our choices are well positioned to thrive as China slows and the commodity boom cools.”

Although each country faces a distinct set of challenges, “all have crucial strengths to draw on and will play increasingly important roles in the future of the global economy,” they said.

Especially for Korea and Poland, both nations, “have also profited from smart leadership and proximity to bigger players; indeed, both have grown so rapidly in recent decades that they no longer fully qualify as ‘emerging,’” they stressed.

However, both countries, they continued, remain more volatile than established, fully developed states, making their manufacturing-driven economies, “especially appealing for investors.”

The FA published an expert’s in-depth insight into and analysis of the Korean market, too.

In his commentary titled, “South Korea: The Backwater That Boomed,” Marcus Noland, executive vice president at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., called Korea’s development over the last half-century as, “nothing short of spectacular.”

“Fifty years ago, the country was poorer than Bolivia and Mozambique. Today, it is richer than New Zealand and Spain,” the analyst said. “For 50 years, South Korea’s economy has grown by an average of seven percent annually. In 1996, it joined the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the club of rich industrialized countries, and in 2010, it became the first Asian country to host a G-20 summit,” he wrote of Korea’s five-decade economic miracle.


Noland went on to say, “To call South Korea an emerging market is a bit of an anachronism.” Although it is not exactly a developed market, he said, “the country may well be more dynamic than some developed economies, making it attractive to investors.”

However, Korea, he pointed out, also faces some serious challenges, such as, “its aging population, highly concentrated corporate sector and politically dangerous neighborhood.”

The two articles are available at the Foreign Affairs website below.

“The Shape of Things to Come: Hot Markets to Watch” by Gideon Rose and Jonathan Tepperman

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140333/gideon-rose-and-jonathan-tepperman/the-shape-of-things-to-come  

“South Korea: The Backwater That Boomed” by Marcus Noland

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140335/marcus-noland/south-korea  

By Sohn JiAe
Korea.net Staff Writer
jiae5853@korea.kr