Korea
Korea opportunities

 Seventy years on from the peninsula's division, South Korea’s president, Park Geun-hye, has pushed the idea of unification as a “bonanza”. For the North, whose minuscule economy is roughly 40 times smaller than that of the South and is only beginning to show signs of reform, that would certainly be the case. But what of South Korea’s gains? The costs of reunion will be staggering—by conservative estimates about $1 trillion, or three-quarters of annual GDP. Its social-security system would need to provide for 25m Northerners, many of them brutalised and malnourished, and including tens of thousands of prisoners in the North’s gulag.