TY  - JOUR
AU  - Auerbach,Alan J.
AU  - Chun,Young Jun
AU  - Yoo,Ilho
TI  - The Fiscal Burden of Korean Reunification: A Generational Accounting Approach
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 10693
PY  - 2004
Y2  - August 2004
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10693
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10693.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Alan J. Auerbach
Department of Economics
508-1 Evans Hall, #3880
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
Tel: 510/643-0711
Fax: 510/643-0413
E-Mail: auerbach@econ.berkeley.edu

Young Jun Chun
Department of Economics
University of Incheon, Korea
Incheon, 402-749, KOREA
E-Mail: yjchun@incheon.ac.kr
AB  - This paper uses Generational Accounting to assess the fiscal impacts of Korean reunification. Our findings suggest that early reunification will result in a large increase in the fiscal burden for most current and future generations of South Koreans. The Korean reunification's fiscal impact appears much larger than that of German reunification, due to a wider gap in productivity between the two Koreas and North Korea's much larger share of the unified country's population. The projected large-scale fiscal burden on South Korea is attributable primarily to the rapid increase in social welfare expenditure for North Korean residents, rather than to the direct reconstruction cost of the North Korean economic system after the disintegration of its old economic regime.
ER  -