This briefing comes from Korea View, a weekly newsletter published by the Korea Economic Institute. Korea View aims to cover developments that reveal trends on the Korean Peninsula but receive little attention in the United States. If you would like to sign up, please find the online form here.

What Happened

• There is growing anxiety around the new flu vaccine after the deaths of at least 13 people who received shots.
• These concerns led to the Ministry of Food and Drug and Safety recalling 615,000 doses of flu vaccines.
• Nonetheless, South Korean authorities refused to suspend the country’s seasonal inoculation program, citing no causal links between flu shots and recent deaths.

Implications: Despite the South Korean government’s prompt response to the COVID-19 outbreak, public confidence in its public health policy remains fragile. The flu vaccine program failed to meet the heightened expectations set by the country’s successful mobilization of resources to manufacture and distribute COVID-19 test kits. This shortcoming may remind people of past cases when the Korean government failed to sufficiently protect the public from both natural and man-made disasters. More presently, the public’s skepticism of the system raises questions on its receptivity to the forthcoming COVID vaccine.

Context: In 2015, the Park Geun-hye administration was deeply criticized for its slow response to the deadly outbreak of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. Officials failed to share important information about the disease and its spread with key actors in the public health infrastructure, which led to higher infection rates and more deaths. Beyond health concerns, Korea continues to experience occasional high-profile public safety failures. These experiences may generate concerns that the government’s quick tackling of COVID-19 was an exception rather than the rule.

Korea View was edited by Yong Kwon with the help of Sophie Joo, Sonia Kim, and Chris Lee.

Picture from flickr user Republic of Korea

This briefing comes from Korea View, a weekly newsletter published by the Korea Economic Institute. Korea View aims to cover developments that reveal trends on the Korean Peninsula but receive little attention in the United States. If you would like to sign up, please find the online form here.

What Happened

• The South Korean government’s medical reform plan proposes to raise admission quotas at medical schools by 400 annually from 3,058 to 3,458 for a decade starting 2022.
• Seoul’s plan addresses data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that South Korea has fewer clinical physicians per capita (2.4 per 1,000) than the member countries’ average (3.5).
• In response to these proposed measures, the Korean Medical Association (KMA) threatened to go on a 3-day strike.

Implications: The KMA’s work stoppage threat reflects the Korean government’s tendency to pursue metric-driven objectives without fully consulting domestic stakeholders in the policy making process. Medical professionals argue that the government’s proposals drive up competition between doctors without addressing underlying discrepancies that yield variations in health outcomes between regions. While the government has sought to talk with the medical community on these issues, the loss of trust will now be difficult to amend.

Context: In June, the Korean government introduced a mandatory quick response (QR) code system in order to trace and prevent the spread of COVID-19 in high-risk indoor facilities. This new system was introduced with great urgency in response to a new outbreak among club goers in Seoul. However, many public health experts and privacy advocates raised questions around the effectiveness of this new tool. This suggested that the Korean government inadequately explained its rationale for the trade-off between privacy and public health, among other concerns, to key civic organizations.

Korea View was edited by Yong Kwon with the help of Sophie Joo, Sonia Kim, and Chris Lee.

Picture from flickr user Republic of Korea

This briefing comes from Korea View, a weekly newsletter published by the Korea Economic Institute. Korea View aims to cover developments that reveal trends on the Korean Peninsula but receive little attention in the United States. If you would like to sign up, please find the online form here.

What Happened

• On July 22, the Ministry of Health and Welfare underscored findings that South Korea’s life expectancy rate (82.7) was above the OECD average (80.7).
• However, the OECD survey also found that fewer Koreans felt healthy (32%) compared to the OECD average (67.9%). This stood in contrast to results from the United States where 87.9% of people felt healthier despite higher morbidity and lower life expectancy (78.7).
• These survey results point to a quandary in South Korea’s health policy as the country enjoys good outcomes (160.1 cancer deaths per 10,000 vs. OECD average of 195.8) but negative public responses.

Implications: The gap between health outcomes and public sentiment may point to South Korea’s underinvestment in mental health. Notably, the country still suffers from a high suicide rate (23 per 100,000) that stands in stark contrast with other OECD member countries with lower health outcomes. For example, 4.3 in every 100,000 people commit suicide per year in the United States. While this represents a major improvement from 2014 when these figures stood at 29.1 per 100,000, South Korean government statistics released in 2017 found that at least 1 in 4 Koreans experience a mental disorder at least once in their life, but only 1 in 10 of affected people pursue professional help.

Context: South Korean societal norms make it difficult for people suffering from mental and emotional stress to seek help. There are fears that search for treatment might place a scarlet letter on not only one’s public image, but also the reputation of their family and broader social circles. Adding to this challenge, there perception that mental illness and violent crimes are closely tied – a consequence of Korean courts placing a spotlight on psychological illness as a motivating factor behind dramatic acts of violence.

Korea View was edited by Yong Kwon with the help of James Constant and Sonia Kim.

Picture from flickr user YJ-Lee

This briefing comes from Korea View, a weekly newsletter published by the Korea Economic Institute. Korea View aims to cover developments that reveal trends on the Korean Peninsula but receive little attention in the United States. If you would like to sign up, please find the online form here.

What Happened

• The South Korean government recently launched a mandatory quick response (QR) code system to log visitors at high-risk entertainment facilities as part of its latest efforts to curb the spread of the coronavirus outbreak.
• This decision came after authorities struggled to trace people who had visited nightclubs and bars in Seoul’s Itaewon district, where clusters of new cases were detected.
• According to South Korea’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC), personal data collected from the QR codes, which includes full names and phone numbers, will be encrypted and destroyed after four weeks.

Implications: The pushback around the adoption of QR code-based tracing system suggests that the policy-making process excluded many public health experts and privacy advocates. Although the government remains buoyed by strong public support, the adoption of the latest tech tools to combat COVID-19 raised questions about the policymaking process from some medical experts. Privacy advocates also raised worries about this latest tech initiative. This further suggests that the government has inadequately explained its rationale for the trade-off between privacy and public health to key civic organizations.

Context: In May, South Korea was in the international spotlight for slowing the spread of COVID-19 without instituting a lockdown. Many nations studied South Korea’s approach to containment. However, a resurgence of infections has raised questions about the effectiveness of Korea’s policies to-date. Although South Korea saw a much larger spike of infections in February and March, those were much easier to track because a majority of the cases were concentrated in a single community of church-goers in the city of Daegu.

Korea View was edited by Yong Kwon with the help of James Constant, Soojin Hwang, Sonia Kim, and Ingyeong Park.

Picture from flickr user Republic of Korea

This briefing comes from Korea View, a weekly newsletter published by the Korea Economic Institute. Korea View aims to cover developments that reveal trends on the Korean Peninsula but receive little attention in the United States. If you would like to sign up, please find the online form here.

What Happened

• To address the growing number of COVID-19 cases, the government temporarily adopted telemedicine in late February, which is banned by the Medical Service Act.
• The majority of patients were satisfied with the remote access to healthcare, while most healthcare providers characterized the service as “inconvenient.”
• Following the government’s announcement that it will revive the economy through digitalization, share prices of companies related to telemedicine skyrocketed.
• However, revision of the Medical Service Act to legalize telemedicine was not included in the government’s blueprint for Korean New Deal which was released on May 7.

Implications: Despite the government’s mobilization of new medical technologies during the height of the COVID-19 outbreak, interest groups have hindered the formal adoption of some novel approaches to public health. This contradicts South Korea’s international reputation as a technocratic state and a leader in telecommunication technology. There were expectations that the use of telemedicine to address the surge in coronavirus patients would create momentum for their full adoption. However, the government continues to only approve pilot projects as opposition from the medical community continues unabated.

Context: The medical community has lobbied against the adoption of doctor-to-patient remote medical treatment for the past two decades. Although South Korea has been conducting pilot tests with telemedicine since 2000, there have not been any procedural movements towards their legalization. A revision to the Medical Service Act that would allow remote treatment has been repeatedly voted down in the legislature due to strong push back from the medical community. While some medical professionals support the adoption of telemedicine, the Korea Medical Association (KMA), the country’s largest organization of medical doctors, appears unlikely to change its opposition.

Korea View was edited by Yong Kwon with the help of Gordon Henning, Soojin Hwang, Hyungim Jang, and Ingyeong Park.

Picture from flickr user YJ-Lee

This briefing comes from Korea View, a weekly newsletter published by the Korea Economic Institute. Korea View aims to cover developments that reveal trends on the Korean Peninsula but receive little attention in the United States. If you would like to sign up, please find the online form here.

What Happened

• Private citizens are building websites and applications to share information about the coronavirus – one of these websites, “Corona Map,” accumulated more than 14 million views in just one month.
• Many of these websites are programmed by university students, and occasionally even some middle school students.
• President Moon Jae-in complimented the student programmer who developed the “Corona Map” and noted that the administration should adopt more efficient information-sharing systems.

Implications: Public investment in software education over the past few years may have contributed to the robustness of ongoing efforts to disseminate information about the coronavirus. Student programmers – many of whom were motivated to study software programming in concert with public education initiatives to prepare the future workforce for the 4th industrial revolution – are building websites that display updates on the viral infection from the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These websites bolster the Moon administration’s aim to contain the epidemic by ensuring greater public awareness of the situation. In addition, the government believes that greater information dissemination will limit the spread of unverified information that could lead to panic.

Context: The previous Park administration had been strongly criticized for placing an embargo on information regarding the spread of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome outbreak in 2014-15. Concerned that there might be widespread panic, the government even issued a warning that people disseminating unverified information would be prosecuted. Nonetheless, a handful of private websites were built that tracked the spread of the disease. This prompted the government to follow suit.

That same year, unrelatedly, the government announced that software and coding education would be added to the standard education curriculum. This prompted a parallel growth in a private market for software and programming education.

Korea View was edited by Yong Kwon with the help of Gordon Henning, Soojin Hwang, Hyungim Jang, and Ingyeong Park.

Picture from flickr user Ji Sun Lee

This briefing comes from Korea View, a weekly newsletter published by the Korea Economic Institute. Korea View aims to cover developments that reveal trends on the Korean Peninsula but receive little attention in the United States. If you would like to sign up, please find the online form here.

What Happened

• WHO will officially ask individual member states to recognize gaming addiction as a mental health disorder on January 1, 2022.
• Park Yang-woo, Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST), vowed to review regulations that hinder the growth of the game industry and said that “gaming is not a disease” at the 2019 Korea Game Award on November 13.
• According to an academic study, formalizing gaming disorder as an official mental disease could cause a $9.45 billion loss to the South Korean economy.
• The government is looking for ways to minimize the loss before a new Korean Standard Classification of Diseases takes effect.

Implications: The dilemma surrounding the gaming industry is another area where the Moon administration is struggling to balance between growth and welfare. Despite increasing concerns about game addiction in South Korea, the government may be reluctant to adopt the WHO’s new standard of ‘gaming disorder’ because it might dampen this major growth industry. According to the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, the game industry accounts for 8.8 percent of Korea’s trade profit. As such, there are concerns that associating gaming with mental illness would suffocate local game businesses, which are already under pressure from increased global competition. As a temporary compromise, the government has assembled a panel of experts and industry people to study the issue further.

Context: Although it attracts less attention than K-pop, Korea’s gaming industry brings in greater revenue for the country. According to statistics from the Korea Creative Content Agency, gaming exports increased 80.7 percent to USD 5.9 billion in 2017. But most of this growth came from Korea’s exports to Chinese-speaking consumers: approximately 60 percent of the sales that year. China is also amidst efforts to regulate gaming in the country and the WHO classification will likely allow the government to intensify its control over the sector. This may have additional negative implications for South Korea’s gaming exports to the country.

Korea View was edited by Yong Kwon with the help of Soojin Hwang, Hyoshin Kim, and Rachel Kirsch.

Picture from user Rob Fahey on flickr

This briefing comes from Korea View, a weekly newsletter published by the Korea Economic Institute. Korea View aims to cover developments that reveal trends on the Korean Peninsula but receive little attention in the United States. If you would like to sign up, please find the online form here.

What Happened

• Earlier this month, South Korea announced new efforts to help combat the country’s worsening fine dust problem.
• Measures include restrictions on private vehicle usage, reduced work hours at construction sites, and even the declaration of temporary holidays when the dust reaches a “serious” level.
• Last week Seoul, Incheon, and the surrounding Gyeonggi Province were hit by the first dust wave of the season.

Implications: Since South Korea has yet to identify the source of the fine dust particles, some observers have asked whether the ongoing measures are effectively targeting the problem. The government deployed 700 vehicles to clear the streets of dust and have been actively prohibiting the operation of diesel vehicles in cities with more than 500,000 people. While some of the dust is generated by pollution in South Korea, it is also believed that some particles come from the Gobi desert in Mongolia and China, and some researchers have said 50-60% of the dust is air pollution from China blown across the Yellow Sea. The government has implemented several domestic procedures but has taken minimal steps in coordinating with China.

Context: Regardless of its origin, air pollution is causing massive health and economic consequences for the country. Of the top 100 most polluted cities in OECD countries, 44 were in South Korea, and in 2017, 17,300 deaths were attributed to air pollution. Furthermore, the new protocol of declaring temporary holidays may dampen businesses’ output due to lost work hours. The dust also poses significant financial concerns for residents. An effective, single-use air filtration mask can cost up to 20,000 won (~$17), which can quickly add up to substantial expense for South Koreans.

Korea View was edited by Yong Kwon with the help of Soojin Hwang, Hyoshin Kim, and Rachel Kirsch.

Picture from user taylorandayumi on flickr

By Kylan Toohey

Last October, a 21-year-old part-time worker at a PC cafe in Seoul was stabbed to death by a 29-year-old customer, identified as Kim Sungsoo, who had been at the facility earlier that same day. Both the brutality of the murder and the perpetrator’s apparent lack of motive placed the crime at the forefront of South Korean news, and many citizens expressed outrage over the authorities’ handling of the situation. Kim has come forward and claimed that he suffers from an “unwell” mind and body, presenting a record of his antidepressant usage as evidence. Under Article 10 of South Korea’s Criminal Law, it is considered unlawful to punish a person who is “unable to make discriminations or control [his] will” due to the presence of a mental disorder. The prospect of Kim receiving a lighter sentence due to a psychological diagnosis led over one million citizens to petition the Blue House for a strong punishment. Although the court has since ruled against Kim’s claim of being unwell in mind and body as a reason for his crime, a formal sentencing has yet to emerge from the trial.

The strong social response was partly a reaction to precedent. Mental health issues and other disorders like alcoholism had been cited in past cases where perpetrators of heinous crimes received lesser sentences on account of their condition. Prominent examples include the 2016 murder at Gangnam station, where a male suspect murdered a woman he had never met before, and the 2008 case of a 54-year-old man who kidnapped and raped a 12-year-old girl. In both instances, the rulings were met with mass dissent, mirroring the current calls for more “fair” punishment for those who claim to be suffering mental and psychological illnesses.

With the country’s understanding of mental health in need of further development, it is detrimental for the conversation on this important issue to continue surfacing in the context of crime.

South Korea, despite its status as a developed nation under the OECD, ranks poorly on mental health statistics among similar countries of its caliber. According to an OECD report released in 2014, South Korea ranked first in suicide rates among developed nations, with 29 in every 100,000 people committing suicide. Of these suicides, around 60 percent are said to have resulted from depression and other mood disorders. South Korean government statistics released in 2017 stated that at least 1 in 4 Koreans experience a mental disorder at least once in their life, but only 1 in 10 of these pursue professional help for their symptoms.

For a fully developed nation like South Korea, these numbers are incredibly dismal. Compare with the United States, for example. In the United States, only 14.3 in every 100,000 people commit suicide per year. This makes suicide only the 10th leading cause of death in the country, whereas suicide stands as the 4th leading cause of death in South Korea, and the number one cause of death for youths aged 9 to 24.

Existing cultural stigmas make it difficult for South Koreans of any age to seek proper treatment for symptoms of mental illness. The association of mental illness with violent crime, as seen in the social response to PC Room murder case, is only part of the problem. South Korean society is largely defined by its high competitiveness, high pressure, and high stakes when it comes to finding and building a “successful” life. From academic pressure to get into one of the top universities in the country to professional pressure to land a job at one of the major conglomerates, South Koreans are certainly not short on emotional stressors.

South Korean societal norms make it difficult for someone suffering from mental and emotional stress to come forward and ask for help for fear of looking “weak” in the face of all of this pressure. Additionally, coming forward and admitting mental illness opens you, and even your family, up to the scrutiny of society, and because of the existing negative stigmas around mental illness, this places a “permanent taint” on your public image that is difficult to erase, which can affect personal and professional opportunity prospects in the future.

The case of Kim Sung Soo and the PC Room murder, and the extreme backlash that it has sparked, serves as an extreme example of what can happen if mental illness goes unchecked. Increased education and awareness about the realities of mental illness can not only help those who may be suffering from its symptoms, but also prevent those who may want to take advantage of it, like the many who have signed the Blue House petition are worried about, from doing so.

Kylan Toohey is an intern at the Korea Economic Institute of America and a graduate student at George Washington University in Asian Studies. The views expressed here are the author’s alone.

Photo from 87ab’s photostream on flickr Creative Commons.

By Jenna Gibson

This week, Seoul’s residents were in a haze – literally. Dangerously high levels of particulate matter in the air prompted emergency measures from the Seoul city government, including making public transportation free during peak hours and asking residents to leave their cars in park as much as possible.

These policies are triggered based on the amount of PM2.5 in the air, with levels above 50 µg/m³ being considered unsafe. On Thursday morning, though, PM2.5 in Seoul hit 160 µg/m³, more than three times that level. Even before this week’s spike, the OECD announced that South Korea has the worst air quality among its members.

Good morning, Seoul air. I wish you could clean up your act, already. https://t.co/VRv5Ziaimq pic.twitter.com/VBjUEo4geB

— Matt Stiles (@stiles) January 16, 2018

The government’s emergency measures may have had limited success, however – according to Arirang, use of buses and subways increased by only 2.1 percent on Monday, and traffic only dropped 1.8 percent.

This was the first time emergency smog measures have been activated since the government announced their new policies in July 2017. Besides the free subway and bus rides, other measures include implementing an odd-even license plate program, where drivers alternate days they can be on the road depending on the last digit of their license plate, as well as upping environmental standards for industries like construction and heating/cooling.

The public discourse surrounding the pollution issue, however, doesn’t often zero in on these domestic industries as the source of the problem. Instead, many media reports about the air pollution problem mention particulates blowing over from China, picking up pollutants from the large country’s many factories before making its way to Seoul. However, a KEI analysis by Professor Matthew Shapiro suggests it’s more complicated than that: “While it is true that the pollution originates in China and is carried eastward on the trade winds, China is not the sole contributor to this problem. Rather, Korean investments in China and the subsequent exports of goods from firms in China all play a role,” he writes. “This is an urgent problem, requiring the cooperation of both countries to manage what is ultimately a regional pollution issue.”

The government is scrambling to get a handle on the pollution issue now not only because of public health, but also because of concerns with the PyeongChang Olympic Games starting in less than a month. To keep particulate levels low, an old theromoelectric power plant near the Olympic venues has been shut down until June, and the government is planning to deploy sensors around the PyeongChang area to measure pollution in real time.

Soulless Seoul air😷 pic.twitter.com/M18wtWrTVe

— Jihye Lee 이지혜 (@TheJihyeLee) January 17, 2018

Meanwhile, residents are finding ways to cope with the dangerously high pollution rates. After the government announced its first fine dust emergency day on Monday, stock shares of companies that make eye drops and face masks soared. Demand for clothing dryers is also on the rise – although many Koreans still air dry their clothes, concerns about pollution pushed the domestic market for dryers up 474 percent in 2017, according to e-commerce site Auction.

Realistically, offering free rides on the bus or subway is great as a temporary, emergency measure, and can be particularly helpful for those on the lower end of the income spectrum who may be forced to walk in the polluted air if they can’t afford to pay for public transportation. However, not only is it not financially feasible for the Seoul city to offer free rides on a long-term basis, it also does nothing to solve the underlying problem of emissions generated both in Korea and blowing in from abroad.

Although it may take more than a few days of free rides to change people’s habits, clearly the measure didn’t incentivize that many drivers to leave their cars at home for the day. The Korean government, coordinating closely with major cities like Seoul, is going to have to step up their attention to this issue, and find ways to address the root of the problem, whether through domestic or diplomatic efforts.

Jenna Gibson is the Director of Communications at the Korea Economic Institute of America. The views expressed here are the author’s alone. Image taken by Jenna Gibson.