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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.
The paper examines the structure, governance, and balance sheets of state-controlled banks in Russia, which accounted for over 55 percent of the total assets in the country's banking system in early 2012. The author offers a credible estimate of the size of the country's state banking sector by including banks that are indirectly owned by public organizations. Contrary to some predictions based on the theoretical literature on economic transition, he explains the relatively high profitability and efficiency of Russian state-controlled banks by pointing to their competitive position in such functions as acquisition and disposal of assets on behalf of the government. Also suggested in the paper is a different way of looking at market concentration in Russia (by consolidating the market shares of core state-controlled banks), which produces a picture of a more concentrated market than officially reported. Lastly, one of the author's interesting conclusions is that China provides a better benchmark than the formerly centrally planned economies of Central and Eastern Europe by which to assess the viability of state ownership of banks in Russia and to evaluate the country's banking sector.
The paper examines the principles for the supervision of financial conglomerates proposed by BCBS in the consultative document published in December 2011. Moreover, the article proposes a number of suggestions worked out by the authors within the HSE research team.