The cost that South Korea will have to bear upon inter-Korea unification is likely to stand at $1 trillion, by conservative estimation, according to U.K. weekly The Economist.
But the nation will also benefit from the influx of population that is younger and almost twice as more productive, a demographic boon for South Korea’s shrinking working-age population, it said.
If unified, the South expects to embrace the North’s abundant rare earth reserves, which are used in electronic production, according to the U.K. media. An estimate from 2012 by a South Korean research institute valued the North’s mineral wealth at $10 trillion, some 20 times larger than that of the South.