Economist: Delaying unification makes it more costly

One of the standard lines of the people opposing Korean unification (all the way up to AntiUnification Minister Chung Dong-young) is that a quick unification of the Koreas is prohibitively expensive and the North must be brought up to the South's level of development before unification is possible. 

Well, the studies of a Korean professor for the Brookings institute (a liberal think tank based in Washington) says that not only is unification delayed unification denied, it is also unification made more expensive.  Let's get straight to the meat:

According to Hwang’s estimates, the cost of unification would have been US$312 billion in 1990, US$777.6 billion in 1995 and US$1.204 trillion in 2000.

(The article does not state if those are constant dollars.)

That does not include the billions that South Korea has already thrown down the black hole of 'development aid' to the North.

Comments

[jtb-in-texas]

if the whole "uni" thing is all about money, wouldn't it have been much cheaper to have just surrendered in 1950?

IMHO, the number of lives brought out of poorly-coifed, Stalinist-wannabee slavery and oppression is a better measure... not that a waygook's opinion matters anyhow...

[baduk]

Unification? How?

By becoming KJI's slaves?

[jtb-in-texas]

Look around, baduk... who besides a few of the over 40 crowd and less than half of the expats in country see KJI as more of a threat to Korea than GWB?

I think, sadly, we're going to see something very traumatic this year... I pray to God that I'm wrong... and it won't be started by the Americans any more than the attack on 6/25/1950 was...