Corruption and business ethics in Korea

First published in The Korea Herald. On most occasions, the Korean government latches on to any new international report or study that commends the country, be it on competitiveness, ease of doing business, regulatory reforms or education. However, there has been remarkable silence from bureaucrats and government officials regarding the latest Corruption Perceptions Index recently released by Transparency International. In its much-awaited yearly report, the nongovernment organization ― calling itself the “global coalition against corruption,” with 100 national chapters and an international secretariat in Berlin ― gives a comparative list of corruption worldwide. The organization is widely recognized as a corruption crusader and has built up a solid reputation since it was established in...

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Regional agreements gaining steam

First published in The Korea Herald. While bilateral free trade agreements, as a means to further the market-opening and rule-making agenda, have been globally picking up steam, there have also been parallel efforts to usher in a plethora of regional trade agreements and economic unions. Given the uncertainty of the multilateral agreement under the ambit of the World Trade Organization, which has been dragging on for years, efforts to form regional agreements are picking up. Although many of them are overlapping, 2015 could see some progress being made on at least some of the deals. They will have a significant impact on global trade. It is an opportunity for countries that seek to diversify their trade partners to closely follow the deals that are being put in place, to get first-mover...

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Crucial year for tackling climate change

First published in The Korea Herald. Toward the end of 2014, there was incremental progress in global efforts to tackle the fallout of climate change. It is now expected that all countries will reach a broad consensus when they meet in Paris in November and December this year. The United Nations Climate Change Conference was held in Lima, Peru, from Dec. 1-12, to negotiate a global climate agreement. This was the 20th yearly session of the Conference of the Parties, or COP 20, to the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCC, and the 10th session of the Meeting of the Parties, or CMP 10, to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. While this was a conference in the annual series, and was hailed as an important first step ― it resulted in a five-page text now officially known as the Lima...

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ICT evolving for consumers in 2015

First published in The Korea Herald. Over the last few years, the impact of information and communication technologies on society has been enormous. ICT has deeply affected and reshaped most parts of our society, while radically influencing the global economy. No one can predict with certainty what role it will play in the future, but we do know that it will be significant. One aspect of the growth of ICT in 2014 has undoubtedly been its entry into the “mobile era.” It is a tool that constitutes a new infrastructure, changing the way our societies function, while its technical applications give us totally new opportunities to develop new and better solutions to our existing problems. As the latest International Telecommunication Union publication “2014 Measuring the Information Society...

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