SEOUL, Jan. 19 (Korea Bizwire) — Nearly eight in 10 local governments outside South Korea’s capital region say they face a serious risk of population decline, underscoring the deepening divide between Seoul and the rest of the country as demographic pressures mount. In a survey released Monday by the Federation of Korean Industries, 77 percent of [...]
SEOUL, Jan. 19 (Korea Bizwire) – South Korea aims to join forces with North Korea to seek UNESCO recognition for the traditional martial art of taekwondo as a shared intangible cultural heritage, officials said Monday. The Cultural Heritage Committee, an advisory body to the Korea Heritage Service (KHS), has selected taekwondo as the next candidate [...]
SEOUL, Jan. 19 (Korea Bizwire) – Police on Monday searched the home of a far-right activist under investigation for defaming statues of a girl representing victims who were forced to Japan’s wartime brothels during World War II, a police official said. Investigators carried out the search and seizure at the residence of Kim Byung-heon, who [...]
SEOUL, Jan. 19 (Korea Bizwire) — A large majority of South Korean workers say the rapid spread of artificial intelligence is likely to widen labor-market inequality and deepen wealth polarization, according to a new nationwide survey. The poll, conducted in October 2025 by research firm Global Research on behalf of the labor advocacy group Workplace Abuse [...]
SEOUL, Jan. 19 (Korea Bizwire) — Young workers in South Korea are increasingly gravitating toward large corporations, even as employment at small businesses shrinks to historic lows — a widening divide that is reshaping the country’s labor market. Government microdata from the Economically Active Population Survey show that in 2025, the number of people in their [...]
SEOUL, Jan. 18 (Korea Bizwire) – South Korea’s military has begun deploying the high-power Hyunmoo-5 ballistic missile, military sources said Sunday, as Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back called for a “balance of terror” to counter North Korea’s nuclear threat. The surface-to-surface missile — dubbed a “monster” because of its size — is designed to strike underground [...]
SEOUL, Jan. 16 (Korea Bizwire) — Foreign students who graduate from South Korean universities face steep hurdles in securing stable residency through employment, according to a new academic study, raising questions about the country’s ability to retain international talent amid demographic decline. The findings, published Friday in the Journal of the Korean Association for Immigration Policy, [...]
SEOUL, Jan. 16 (Korea Bizwire) — The government will roll out a range of tax incentives to support vulnerable groups and small merchants, and expand strategic technology industries to help create new growth engines, the finance ministry said Friday. The measures are part of a follow-up amendment to enforcement decrees linked to the government’s tax [...]
SEOUL, Jan. 16 (Korea Bizwire) – The unification and foreign ministries launched their vice ministerial-level consultative channel to coordinate policies on North Korea on Friday, officials said. Vice Unification Minister Kim Nam-jung and Jeong Yeon-doo, vice minister for diplomatic strategy and intelligence at the foreign ministry, held a luncheon meeting earlier in the day in [...]
SEOUL, Jan. 15 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s National Health Insurance Service suffered another legal setback Thursday in its long-running effort to hold tobacco companies financially responsible for smoking-related diseases, as an appeals court again rejected its claim for damages—12 years after the lawsuit was first filed. The Seoul High Court upheld a lower-court ruling dismissing [...]