EFSAS STUDY PAPER - South Korea’s New Southern Policy

The Committee Report further states that the NSP “provides support for Korean companies to participate in infrastructure projects and make inroads into the manufacturing sector in the NSP target countries”, explicitly recognizes the importance of Korean popular culture, and views the NSP countries as “promising markets for building a global open innovation platform for a joint response to the Four. [...] The effects of the pandemic, in conjunction with the relatively novel changes in the ROK’s internal diplomatic bureaucracy towards ASEAN and India, indicates that the long-term effects of the NSP are likely to take time for analysts to judge them in their effectiveness (Botto, 2021, p. [...] From an ASEAN perspective, the focus on trade and cultural collaboration, non-traditional security issues, and the rejection of a hegemonic outlook on regional order aligns with the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific, which refutes the application of a zero-sum logic and seeks to ensure ASEAN centrality in the region (Nilsson-Wright & Yie, 2018, p. [...] In essence, the NSP seeks to place the diversification drive of South Korean corporations in a broader geopolitical context: the growing China-US competition and the linked (economic) volatility. [...] Today, the robustness of the Indian digital service industry and the market-leading role of South Korean MNCs in digital manufacturing creates a natural market complementarity, including in the development of 5G and AI technology.