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Russia's Policy toward Korean Peninsular - 2012 Korean Russian Jeju Forum
Korean-Russian Jeju Forum 2012 was organized by the East Asia Foundation and was dedicated to relations between Russia and the countries of the Korean Peninsula.
Currently, Russia has come to realize that a resolute turn to East Asia is a necessary means to both give impetus to economic modernization of its Far Eastern areas and strengthen its international positions. For these tasks to be a success, coordinating prospective planning with that of East Asian countries is a vital precondition. In this regard, worthy of attention is the gas pipeline from Russia to the Republic of Korea via the territory of DPRK. What factors are at present determining Russia’s renewed interest in the pipeline? And what strategic traps – if any – can Russia fall into in case the project is implemented?
For Russia, this issue is not new – it has been addressed in some way or another since the beginning of the 1990s. Various options concerning sources of gas supply, routes of transportation etc. have been explored. Simultaneously, the project has been a focus of special interest among Russian experts. With these factors in mind, an attempt to analyze the project in Russia’s priorities, both current and future, seems to be a timely exercise.
The 11th International Seapower Symposium in Seoul was organised on Sep. 6th. The theme of the symposium was “Changing Maritime Security Environments and the Role of Navy: Challenges and Opportunities”. There were about six hundred senior officers and scholars from China, the United States, Japan, Russia, England, Australia and the ROK, which discussed principal problems and tendencies of modern maritime security.
This paper examines the state of the global food problem, food security in East Asia and the opportunity for Russia to prevent a food deficit in North Korea. The authors analyze the symptoms of the global food problem, the theoretical approaches to food security, the transformation of food consumption in Asia and the food trade between Russia and the Korean Peninsula. One major conclusion is that Russia is in the best position among all the countries of the world to increase food exports to Asia – and especially to North Korea – while the Asian population’s habits of food consumption shape the new structure of food trade between that region and the rest of the world.
We address the external effects on public sector efficiency measures acquired using Data Envelopment Analysis. We use the health care system in Russian regions in 2011 to evaluate modern approaches to accounting for external effects. We propose a promising method of correcting DEA efficiency measures. Despite the multiple advantages DEA offers, the usage of this approach carries with it a number of methodological difficulties. Accounting for multiple factors of efficiency calls for more complex methods, among which the most promising are DMU clustering and calculating local production possibility frontiers. Using regression models for estimate correction requires further study due to possible systematic errors during estimation. A mixture of data correction and DMU clustering together with multi-stage DEA seems most promising at the moment. Analyzing several stages of transforming society’s resources into social welfare will allow for picking out the weak points in a state agency’s work.