NEW YORK ― At the conclusion of their summit in Durban in March, the leaders of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) announced their intention to establish a New Development Bank aimed at “mobilizing resources for infrastructure and sustainable development projects in BRICS and other emerging economies and developing countries.”The significance of this decision cannot be overemphasized. For starters, it reflects the enormous successes in economic development during the last

Viewpoints May 5, 2013

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving, younger brother accused in the Boston bombings, migrated from Russia to America at the age of 8. Seung-hui Cho, who committed the Virginia Tech massacre, migrated from South Korea to the U.S. at the age of 8. I also immigrated to the U.S. at the age of 8. It reminds me that we have many troubled young men in our country, and that Tsarnaev could have been anyone’s son, brother or friend. I was disappointed by news reports that some ethnic Chechens in Boston and e

Viewpoints May 5, 2013

The National Election Commission has come up with a set of proposals to change the nation’s election culture, which it described as overly restrictive. The election watchdog says its proposals are geared toward enhancing the freedom of candidates and voters to express their political views. True, the nation’s election regulations are too rigid. They specify the official campaign period and ban most campaign activities before it. These restrictions, however, are intended to ensure a level playing

Editorial May 3, 2013

President Park Geun-hye reminded many of her father when she presided over a meeting on trade and investment at Cheong Wa Dae on Wednesday. Attended by corporate CEOs as well as ministers, the high-profile session was designed to resolve problems that hamper exports and investment.The troubleshooting meeting was modeled after the monthly export promotion meetings that former President Park Chung-hee had held from 1965 to 1979. Through these meetings, the late president sought to remove the obsta

Editorial May 3, 2013

By now, you’re probably tired of all the back-and-forth on Reinhart and Rogoff. That would be Harvard University’s Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, the economists who co-authored the 2009 best-seller, “This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Follies,” and who are now on the firing line because of minor data errors in a 2010 working paper. That paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” found that high public debt was associated with slower growth. Specifically, when a nation’s gross publ

Viewpoints May 3, 2013

The main opposition party is set to change its name from the Democratic United Party back to its previous one, the Democratic Party, at its upcoming national convention on Saturday, which speaks volumes about the precarious state in which it is placed.To reflect its of forging alliances with the Federation of Korean Trade Unions and progressive activist groups led by diehard supporters of former President Roh Moo-hyun, the main opposition changed its name in late 2011. The shift to the left was

Editorial May 2, 2013

The settlement of a dispute over the withdrawal of South Korean companies from the North Korean border town of Gaeseong may become messy, given that the North Koreans are notoriously tenacious in making unreasonable demands in negotiations, as witnessed time and again in the past.As the South Korean unification minister says, however, yielding to undue demands is out of the question this time. Still, North Korea can have its way if it decides to confiscate all assets that the departing companies

Editorial May 2, 2013

In 1999, President Bill Clinton set out to right a wrong: the government’s widespread discrimination against black farmers, particularly in the South. The victims had applied for farming loans but, owing to bias on the part of federal loan officers, had been rejected. Faced with 1,000 claims in a class-action lawsuit, the U.S. Department of Agriculture agreed to pay $50,000 to each claimant to settle the matter. “It’s a tremendous victory for black farmers across the nation,” exulted John Boyd J

Viewpoints May 2, 2013

Two young passengers on Taiwan’s Kaohsiung Metro recently got themselves into trouble for engaging in oral sex on the train. The action of the Internet pals ― he a college sophomore and she a high school senior ― was filmed and posted on Facebook by a Hong Kong tourist. The video quickly went viral and was shared by tens of thousands on the Internet within 24 hours. The next day it was the front-page story on a local daily and soon after that the pair reported to the police. They are now facing

Viewpoints May 2, 2013

A terrorist attack is like a national Rorschach test. Everybody sees in it what they want ― usually something that proves a point they’ve been making all along.Even before the Tsarnaev brothers were identified as the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombings, speculation about the unknown attackers fell mostly into two camps: They could be Muslim jihadists, or they could be American anti-tax extremists. Guess which suggestion came from liberals and which from conservatives.Once real suspects

Viewpoints April 29, 2013

“Work authorization is not meant to get you rich, it’s to let you live,” said an Egyptian asylum-seeker who fled to the United States after a radical group beat him and tried to kidnap his wife and daughter. After fleeing persecution in their home countries, asylum-seekers like this man in New Jersey face a new type of maltreatment in the United States: The U.S. government won’t let them work during what is often a drawn-out asylum process.As a result, vulnerable people who come to this country

Viewpoints April 28, 2013