South Korea yesterday welcomed a media report that North Korea wants to learn from Vietnam about its economic reforms.
"It is encouraging if North Korea tries to learn from Vietnam's experiences," presidential spokesman Cheon Ho-seon said.
A Hong Kong-based weekly magazine reported on Sunday that the North's leader Kim Jong-Il intends to visit Vietnam to assess its Doi Moi economic reforms introduced in 1986.
Yazhou Zhoukan magazine said Kim made the remark while meeting Nong Duc Manh, secretary-general of Vietnam's Communist Party, in Pyongyang earlier this month.
It cited an interview with Foreign Minister Pham Gia Khiem who accompanied the secretary-general.
"Chairman Kim Jong-il highly evaluated the achievements Vietnam's Doi Moi has made in the past 20 years while meeting with Secretary-General Manh," Khiem was quoted as saying, adding that Kim accepted Manh's invitation visit to Hanoi.
The current trip to Hanoi by North Korean Prime Minister Kim Yong-il aims to prepare for the leader's visit, the magazine said.
Vietnam's reforms ushered in dramatic growth but left the authority of the communist party unchallenged.
Meanwhile, Seoul will need to spend about US$1 trillion or more to renovate North Korea's creaky infrastructure if the two were to reunite, a South Korean study said, adding that the cost will go up further over time.
But the South's economy can expect benefits through decreased military spending, selling to new markets in the North and tapping into its cheap land and labor, said the report from the National Assembly's Special Committee on Budget and Accounts.
The report said if the two Koreas reunified in 2015, it would cost the South US$858 billion over 10 years to absorb its destitute neighbor and raise its economy to half that of the South's.
If the two started in 2030, the cost would be US$1.32 trillion.
Many in South Korea are worried that unifying could wreck its economy -- the world's 13th largest. They also fear a flood of refugees coming over the border from the North -- whose economy is less than 3 percent the size of the South's.
North Korea infrastructure is a shambles with rail lines, roads and power grids built during Japan's 1910 to 1945 rule over the Korean Peninsula still in use.
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