KOREA, ESSENTIAL BACKGROUND

Korea is located in Eastern Asia, bordering Russia, China and Japan between the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan. Korea was an independent kingdom for much of the past millennia. Following its victory in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, Japan occupied Korea; five years later it formally annexed the entire peninsula. After World War II, a Republic of Korea (ROK) was set up in the southern half of the Korean Peninsula while a communist-style government was installed in the north (the Democratic People's Republic of Korea — DPRK). During the Korean War (1950–53), U.S. troops and UN forces fought alongside soldiers from the ROK to defend South Korea from DPRK attacks, supported by China and the Soviet Union. An armistice was signed in 1953, splitting the peninsula along a demilitarized zone at about the 38th parallel. Thereafter, South Korea achieved rapid economic growth with per capita income rising to roughly fourteen times the level of North Korea. In 1993, Kim Yo'ng-sam became South Korea' first civilian president following thirty-two years of military rule. South Korea today is a fully functioning modern democracy. In June 2000, a historic first North-South summit took place between the South's President Kim Dae-jung and the North's leader Kim Jong Il.

The population of ROK, according to July 2006 estimation, is 48.8 million and DPRK is 22.7 million (2004 survey).

Since the early 1960s, the Republic of Korea has achieved rapid economic growth, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as the “Miracle on the Han River” and emerged as one of the leading industrial and trading powers, which have turned it into a major factor of political and economic stability of Asia. An outward-oriented economic development strategy, which used exports as the engine of growth, contributed greatly to the radical economic transformation of South Korea. The areas of strongest development have been shipbuilding, semiconductors and consumer electronics, the automobiles, textiles and steel. Today ROK's GDP per capita is comparable to the economies of the European Union. From 1962 to 2004, South Korea's Gross National Income (GNI) increased from US$2.3 billion to US$777 billion in 2004, with its per capita GNI increasing to about US$14,162 last year. South Korea is today the eleventh-largest economy in the world.