This item is accessible only to the Washington University community.
Off-Campus WUSTL Users: Click the “Off-Campus Download” button below. You will be prompted to log in using your WUSTL Key.
Language
English (en)
Date of Award
5-1-2013
Author's Department
International and Area Studies
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts (A.B.)
Restricted/Unrestricted
Restricted
Abstract
Since the division of the Korean Peninsula there has been a steady exodus of North Korean refugees entering South Korea. This journey is politicized, as politics influence the decision of refugees to migrate as well as how they are treated. Despite the presence of government initiatives designed to aid refugees in their adjustment to life in the South, the North Korean refugee community as a whole remains marginalized and struggles to adjust. Yet there are a few refugees who have been quite successful even by South Korean standards. This research is designed to answer the question: which refugees are succeeding, by the standards of doing better than government assistance alone would enable them to do, in the South Korean economy? After assessing how health, education, and discrimination hinder refugees who were affluent in North Korea disproportionately less than their counterparts, I hypothesize that being a part of the North Korean elite is a necessary but not sufficient condition for succeeding in the South. After testing this hypothesis I conclude that refugees who are successful in the South were once part of the North Korean elite. This is because as members of the North Korean elite these refugees were able to invest in their human capital, which allowed them to better adapt to the South Korean economy.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7936/atxb-6r87
Recommended Citation
Carpenter, Carolyn, "From Oppression to Suppression: The Integration of North Korean Refugees into the South
Korean Economy" (2013). Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses. 157.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.7936/atxb-6r87
Comments
Accessibility Notice: This document is a scanned text that has been automatically processed using Python's Tesseract Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine to provide a text alternative for assistive software. Formatting or character recognition discrepancies may exist.