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This is South Korea and this is North Korea.

Despite being related, you've maybe heard that they don't exactly get along very well with one another.

But what would happen if they did?

And North and South simply joined together and became Korea.

Basically, a lot of really weird things, because despite both being Korea, you'd be hard pressed to find two countries that were any more different.

When you look at an overview of the two countries, you'll notice that North Korea has a population that's only half the size of the South.

But more alarmingly, the North Korean economy is pathetically smaller than the South's 54 times smaller.

In fact, North Korea is only the 150 18th largest global economy.

While South Korea stands tall as the world's 12th largest economy, however, North Korea does have more to offer the South than meets the eye.

North Korea has a massive supply of natural re sources like coal, uranium and medals, in addition to a large pool of cheap, unskilled labor that the South doesn't have.

While the South in turn, has a massive amount of capital technology and high skilled workers that the North doesn't have, the combination of these two together would gradually transformed Korea as a whole into an economic powerhouse.

A paper written by economists at Goldman Sachs back in 2000 and nine suggested that a unified Korea would have potential to surge ahead to the world's seventh largest economy by 2050 blowing past Russia, Canada, Brazil and Italy.

United Korea has potential to be an extraordinarily powerful country on the world stage, but the road to get there is going to be long and painful.

And here's why.

Let's compare the difficulties of reunifying Korea today with the difficulties of reunifying a similar country.

Back in the 19 nineties, Germany, just like Korea, Germany was divided in half for decades between a capitalist and communist side.

But on like Korea so far, Germany eventually came back together.

And there's good reasons for why it was possible for Germany but hasn't been for Korea.

Germany didn't experience of violent civil war between the two sides that killed millions of people while Korea did.

Geographically, East Germany had a political enclave of West Germany deep inside of the country, West Berlin, which easily allowed information and knowledge of the outside world to enter East Germany.

North Korea's geography, meanwhile, is very different.

There are no political enclaves inside of the country.

There is ocean to the east and the West, the most fortified border in human history, with millions of soldiers and land mines in the south and the only countries to the north where fellow communist countries China and the Soviet Union, it is geographically way harder to get outside information or knowledge into North Korea than it was for East Germany, which means the North Koreans are far less aware of how much wealthier South Koreans are than East Germans were of West Germans.

First of all, though, North Korea is way mawr, economically depressed than East Germany.

Ever waas In 1990 West Germans had incomes there were three times higher on average than East Germans.

But today, South Koreans have incomes that air 20 who times higher on average than North Koreans.

In the event of a sudden reunification like what happened in Germany.

A flood of low skilled and uneducated North Koreans air going to come down into the south and the South is going have to foot the bill to raise living standards and development back in the North.

This could cost the South Korean taxpayers upto one trillion U.

S.

Dollars to accomplish over a period of 10 years, which would almost certainly stagnate and harm the economy in the short run.

So kind of.

Because of that, a lot of people in South Korea don't even want reunification anymore.

Polls have consistently shown that only around 56% of South Koreans actually want reunification these days, while an overwhelming 72% of young South Koreans under 30 don't want it at all.

And that doesn't even factor in what North Koreans might think.

There's currently around 30,000 North Korean defectors who have escaped and are living in South Korea and integrating into the radically different culture there has been difficult for all of them.

North Korea is effectively an absolute Stalinist monarchy ruled by the Kim dynasty, where citizens needs and jobs are mandated by the government.

While South Korea is a liberal Democratic capitalist state with cut throat competition for employment.

North Korean men have to serve 10 years in the military, and they aren't used to competing for jobs or employment.

So defectors naturally, always struggled to adapt in the very different environment of the South, and they will struggle under a reunification as well.

But perhaps the biggest challenges that Korea faces towards the reunification our geopolitical ones most importantly what happens to North Korea and the Kim Dynasty.

North Korea controls the largest military of any country in the world in terms of sheer size, with over 7.7 million men who have military training, which is almost one out of every three people in the country.

North Korea controls 1300 aircraft, 300 helicopters, 4300 tanks, 70 submarines and, most frightening of all, an estimated stockpile of 60 nuclear weapons, in addition to an unknown number of medium to short range missiles and around 5000 tons of chemical weapons.

If Korea reunified under the rule of the South, the fate of this massive and deadly army is just unknown.

The nukes and chemical weapons may be dismantled or sold off toe less trustworthy people like terrorists and the unemployed North Korean nuclear weapons scientists themselves may leave to find work with a new employer somewhere else.

Unification is a potential powder keg of uncertainty that could go smoothly or go violently explosive.

So the plan for reunification in the South currently is a gradual one whereby North Korea slowly becomes incorporated into the South and begins as a sort of one country, two systems style of government not to uncivil to the relationship between China and Hong Kong.

This way, the North keeps the high amount of autonomy, could even keep Kim around for a while and gradually over a few decades, get absorbed into the government of the South.

But things could obviously go pretty differently.

North Korea could theoretically collapse seemingly overnight, the same way that East Germany did, which could lead to a whole list of possible crazy scenarios.

Fast Korean reunification would dramatically upset the balance of power in Asia, just like the reunification of Germany did in Europe, and as far as China would be concerned, it would be a disaster.

The flood of unskilled and uneducated North Korean migrants may move south, or they may move north into Manchuria, which would be a massively destabilizing event for China, especially when you consider that a unified Korea could further inflame ethnic nationalism.

Among the millions of Koreans that already live in China across the border and as the other emerging global superpower, China worries that it is being actively contained by the other global superpower.

The United States, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines are all considered major allies of the US, which, interestingly, all seem to be located close to China and could be used the block Chinese expansion.

China obviously resents this, and they use North Korea as essentially a buffer state in East Asia between themselves and the U.

S allies of the region.

If North Korea suddenly collapsed, though, it might mean South Korean soldiers or, worse yet, American soldiers moving in and setting up bases on China's very border, which the Chinese Communist Party could never accept.

If it looked like North Korea would quickly join the United Korea that would maintain a close alliance with the US, China would almost certainly intervene to prevent it, just like they did the last time this almost happened in the Korean War, China might just outright invade North Korea on their own and take the country over themselves to prevent it from falling into the hands of the US led alliance.

In order to have any hope of being successful, a United Korea would have to walk a fine line between China and the United States and probably strive their best towards neutrality.

Going too far towards America wouldn't infuriate China with the prospect of another country falling out of their orbit into the American sphere.

But going too far towards China would cause uneasiness in both America and Japan.

However it goes, though, the initial costly investment and reunification would eventually pay off for the Korean people as a whole.

By 2050 Korea would likely already be ranked among the global great powers.

For the first time in history, she would have at least the seventh largest economy in the world and likely even higher than that.

Some economists even expect that a unified Korea could eventually overshadow even Japan to become the world's third largest economy, remaining only behind China and the United States.

Korea would have an enormous population around 80 million strong, with some of the most advanced technology in the world, the largest standing military on the planet, potentially dozens of nuclear weapons if they decided to keep them, and on incredibly strategic geographic location at the crossroads of the most valuable trade route in the entire world between the world's 2nd and 3rd largest economies today, Korea would be a great power.

But the road to get there is long and difficult.

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