Competing Regional Interests and Reunification
As with many complex situations, any effort to address the question of how competing regional interests would play out in response to Korean reunification begins with “it depends.”1 Countless reunification studies conducted by governments, think tanks and universities in a host of capitals have yielded policy recommendations that are heavily affected by case selection bias—specifically, an overreliance on the German reunification experience as a roadmap. As investment brochures warn, however, past performance is usually a poor metric when investing in stocks. The goal of this chapter is to provide readers with an analytical framework through which they can assess competing regional interests related to reunification and identify ways to address challenges and maximize opportunities.