EU-Korea Economic Exchange

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Even though the roots of the global financial crisis lay in risky financial structures in the United States and weaknesses in financial regulation, the crisis became global mainly because of significant financial and trade linkages between the US and other countries. Most countries, including European Union countries and Korea, have felt the impact of the global crisis. The major channels through which the global crisis transmitted to the EU economy seems to be related to the internationalisation of the financial services industry and financial interlinkages, while in Korea the trade channel was more important.

There was a striking difference between the ways in which the EU and Korea were affected by the global financial and crisis. While the initial shock was broadly similar after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, Korea recovered very quickly and output in 2013 is expected to exceed by more than 18 percent the 2007 output level. But the EU’s output is still expected to fall behind the pre-crisis value. The current mild impact of the crisis on Korea is in contrast to the harsh impact of the Asian crisis in the late 1990s, when Korean output fell significantly in 1998, though it recovered quickly after 1999.

Based on these observations, we launched a research project to learn from each other by studying the crisis response in the EU and Korea, and the potential for internationalisation of the financial services industry in the EU and Korea. This research was supported by the European Commission, for which we are grateful.

We organised two major conferences, one in Brussels on Global financial services integration on 16 April 2012, and one in Seoul on The Eurozone crisis and its impact on the global economy on 16 January 2013. We published four newsletters with various articles related to our research themes. This e-book collects our contributions to this project and presents the conference summaries.

Zsolt Darvas, Bruegel April 2013