SEOUL, Dec. 18 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea plans to expand its national heritage–based industries into a ₩100 trillion ($75 billion) market over the next five years, positioning cultural legacy as a core driver of the country’s global soft power, the Korea Heritage Service (KHS) said Wednesday in its 2026 policy blueprint. The initiative comes amid [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 17 (Korea Bizwire) — Foreign visitors to South Korea are increasingly favoring “value-for-money” shopping aligned with personal tastes, signaling a shift away from the high-end, big-ticket purchases that once dominated tourist consumption, according to new data released by the Korea Tourism Organization (KTO). An analysis of foreign credit card transactions from 2018 through September [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 12 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s newly created media regulator said Friday it will open a transparency center next year to confront the spread of online disinformation, signaling an aggressive shift in how the government intends to police digital content. The announcement came as the Korea Media Communications Commission (KMCC) delivered its first [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 12 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s newlywed population slipped below the one-million mark for the second year in a row in 2024, a symbolic threshold for a country already preoccupied with its demographic future. Government data released Friday show just 952,000 couples had been married for five years or less last year—a 2.3 [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 11 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea will introduce new regulations to curb the rapid spread of artificial intelligence–generated false and exaggerated advertising, including a mandatory labeling system for AI-produced content and punitive damages for malicious misinformation, government officials said Wednesday. The package was approved at a national policy coordination meeting chaired by Prime Minister [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 11 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea plans to gradually open access to its national integrated bio big data system beginning in the second half of next year, as part of a broader push to accelerate the use of medical and public health data across research and clinical fields, the government said Wednesday. The Ministry [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 8 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea is quietly becoming more diverse. New census data released by the Ministry of Statistics and Data show that people with a migration background accounted for more than 5 percent of the country’s population in 2024 — a modest but meaningful increase in a nation long assumed to be [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 8 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korean police have reassigned an investigator specializing in medical crimes to reexamine allegations that resident doctors at a major Seoul hospital received illicit kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies, signaling renewed scrutiny of a case long criticized for lackluster enforcement. According to officials and reporting by Yonhap News Agency, the Seoul [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 6 (Korea Bizwire) — Both the United States and China have quietly omitted references to the “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” from major national security documents released in recent weeks, raising speculation over whether the two most influential actors in nuclear diplomacy with Pyongyang are recalibrating their approach. The omission in Washington was notable. [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 6 (Korea Bizwire) — A sweeping shift in American national security priorities — from reasserting influence in the Western Hemisphere to elevating Taiwan’s defense and omitting North Korea’s denuclearization — is prompting fresh debate in Seoul over what the changes signal for South Korea’s security role in Asia. The White House on Thursday [...]