To be paid with exporting North Korean natural resources, using cheap labor, and expanding the labor market by sending up all those unemployed youth in administrative jobs.
It's really a win-win situation, as long as radical Juche doesn't perk up.
On the other hand, the later the POD of this sort of thing gets, the less enthusiastic S Koreans get for reunification. Esp. if this happened anytime more than a few years after German reunification. I hear from a lot of Koreans that they don't wanna reunify because it would be too damn expensive.
Yup. Goldman Sachs estimates a unified Korea could do very very well for itself in the long run, even if the initial costs will be huge.
Agreed here. I think they mentioned that if Korea were to unify sometime in the next decade or so, there's a good chance that the country could become a larger economic power than even Japan. That also has very interesting implications for power projection, currently SK is working on four Dokdo helicopter carriers, and thinking about getting themselves some VTOL aircraft, which would make those 4 in effect light aircraft carriers. The big wild card in any NK scenario, Cold War or post Cold War, seems to be China tho.
This probably will happen, considering the way that a lot of South Koreans treat North Korean refugees now, it won't be surprising to see bad things happening if the north is flooded with chaebol carpetbaggers. Then, when the 60 years of bad habits and work-shirking caused by the side effects of quotas and ideological incentives possessed by the cheap labor force cause problems, the chaebols might start just bringing in Thai and Filipino workers with a more developed capitalist work ethic in to get at those resources instead. And then we will see Juche, and 우리 민족제일주의 (a.k.a. Korean ultra-ethnic-nationalism) rise up again...
Oh god, I know I mentioned this before, but there's gonna be a huge problem with reunification culturally the later it happens. Korea's constantly been getting more and more multicultural since about the late 90s, to say nothing of all the Koreans abroad and the adoptees. Any point past 1990 or so, that's gonna be a huge issue that the ROK government is gonna have a hell of a time trying to answer and figure out a solution to.
On the chaebols, that could be bad just the chaebols themselves, but regardless, its basically impossible for anybody to be more corrupt or more screwed up than NK is right now. The other interesting thing for them is attempting to reforets and rebuild the natural environment, one thing I'm virtually certain of is that the North has been deforested, particularly since the famine started hitting and people chopped down all the forests to make room for their own personal plots of land. On the other hand, some of the chaebols have land in Madagascar and other African countries, and the really realy ironic part is that for some of those plots of farmland, its not considered importing food (wiki neocolonialism, there's a little segment on it there), so depending on how well cultivation of those areas go as well, that could also help the situation a bit while people try and rebuild the farmlands in NK.
I'm going to take some time to think and address the OP more seriously.
On that note, getting China and NK at war, given how absolutely insane the whole Kim Dynasty has been, if say the Cultural Revolution goes even more out of control, and say, China starts to have problems holding on, wonder what the Kims might wanna try and do with say, the parts of Manchuria that used to be part of Goguryeo? There's still a lot of ethnic Koreans there even to this day, so under the guise of "protecting" fellow Koreans, again, with the whole ridiculous ethnonationalism in NK, its not implausible for NK to try and pick off a piece of China if it becomes THAT weak. Not super super plausible, but history rarely is.
I can't see Koreans bringing in migrant workers to that extent unless Japan does as well. Unlikely to say the least.
Actually this is already happening. There's a lot of migrant workers in Korea from Pakistan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and I think some former Soviet republics in the Caucasus, not to mention all the Chinese Koreans here too (out of all the Chinese nationals here, I think they're like 2/3 of them). In fact, there's so many people here as migrant workers that Korea now may have as many as a quarter million illegal immigrants in the country, which relative to the number of foreigners in the country and Korea itself, is a rather decent number.