Moving Beyond South Korea’s Hierarchal Business Structure for Sustainable Green Growth

Despite the international rise of South Korean businesses like Samsung, Hyundai and LG as global powerhouses, the corporate culture in this East Asian nation is often known to have a vertically rigid command line.

Youth Create Businesses that Are Geared to Protecting the Environment

An organic pesticide safe for farmers and the environment, and carbonised fuel briquettes made from agricultural waste materials and organic waste are all business ideas that promote a green economy.

South Korea Looks at How to Accelerate its Transition to Renewable Energy

While major countries have pledged to be powered entirely by renewable energies in order to stop greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, there are a number of states that are investigating ways to implement this transition quickly in order to achieve their goals ahead of this deadline.

Public-Private Pacts Open Doors to Climate Finance in Rwanda and Ethiopia

The Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) presented the African model of a National Financing Vehicle in which the governments of Rwanda and Ethiopia have successfully promoted green growth and climate resilience, at an event May 25 on the sidelines of the annual meetings of the Board of Governors of the African Development Bank (AfDB) in Busan, South Korea.

Former UN Chief Takes the Helm of Global Green Growth Institute

In the face of climate change and growing energy demand in developing countries, Ban Ki-moon, the new president and chair of the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI), unveiled his vision for a more sustainable path by helping countries in their transition to greener economies and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The Two Koreas: Between Economic Success and Nuclear Threat

The two Koreas are an odd match – both are talking about possible dialogue but both have different ideas of the conditions, and that difference comes from the 62-year-old division following the 1950-53 Korean War.

Storm in a Rice Bowl

Rice, a staple of the South Korean diet, is stirring up a bowlful of worry for Seoul. Under a promise to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the government has to make a tough choice on rice imports by June this year.

Koreans Embrace Some Old Ways

Old family bonds still seem to run deep in the South Korea of today. For evidence, one need only look at the yearning of the elderly to meet their long separated kin in North Korea during last month’s historic family reunions.

North Korea Doing Fine Without the South

If the North Korea of the 1990s was seen as a starving nation that produced an exodus of hungry people, then the picture should be even gloomier now – six years after it stopped receiving South Korea’s generous aid. But it’s not. The nation of 24 million people, widely said to be the most secretive in the world and a nuclear threat, appears to have weathered the years well.

NORTH KOREA: Women Wear Pants, Revive Markets

North Korea's communist government frowns upon women wearing pants, seeing it as a mark of ‘rotten bourgeois lifestyles.' Yet, wives, literally wearing pants, are selling goods in the local markets to supplement their husbands' meagre pay packets.

NORTH KOREA: On Sale, Girls Look for Chinese Husbands

North Koreans have increasingly been crossing into the northern border cities of China, with women outnumbering men. "Women represent about 70 percent of some 200,000 North Koreans who fled from North Korea into China in the past few years," Kim Tae Jin, a North Korean defector who leads a nongovernment organisation to protect the human rights of fellow North Koreans tells IPS.

North and South Korea Far Apart

Young North Koreans who have defected to the South are determined to see their dream - a unified Korea - become reality, even if their counterparts in the South don't quite agree.

KOREAS: ‘Missile Rattling Won’t Work’

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak warned leaders in North Korea on Sunday that it would be counterproductive for Pyongyang to pursue a path involving the development of missiles that threaten its neighbours.