The Korea Economic Association (KEA) has informed us that they will provide the room and board (3 days/two nights) for 30 members of the KAEA who will present papers at the convention. They plan to make an arrangement with a hotel near the Korea University, the site of the convention. This is the minimum support they can guarantee as of now, but they will try to do as best as they could as their fund raising efforts progress.

I have solicited for opinions from a few members of the KAEA about our options. The responses ranged from a non-participation unless the KEA can provide a better financial support, to a participation with the current offer. Several members raised a concern about the reasons for their current meager support: is it due to the economic condition as they claim, or are there some other reasons? To this, I am convinced that they are trying to do their best, but make it a frugal convention to avoid any criticism from the media. They are very wary of using the hard currency when they project 1.7 million unemployed workers and the plight of the unemployed heads of the households are reported daily on the newspapers. Professor Woo Sik Jung, who was the VP of the KAEA two years ago and is staying in Korea now, also informed me that the prospect for sufficient fund raising for the convention is pretty bleak, and there is even some doubt among the KEA officials if they can raise enough fund to run the convention at all. He promised to keep checking on it.

Given this background, the majority of members who responded to my inquiry expressed that (i) we should continue the relationship with the KEA and (ii) we should try to provide for the travel expenses by ourselves. We are working on several ways to provide for at least $500 toward the travel expenses. We asked the secretary of the convention committee of the KEA (professor Young Bum Park) to look into the possibility of free and discounted airline tickets from the KAL and Asiana airline. Professor Jong S. You at the Alagoma University also asked Governor Jong Keun You (KAEA VP in 1991) for a help, and he promised to look into it. Our sincere gratitude to Professor You for his efforts.

We will also try to raise a little bit of fund from Korea ourselves, though all sources there are telling me "forget it". We need help from each of you.

In the worst case, we may use the fund in the current KAEA account as many members suggested. We will inform you all about it as soon as possible.

Finally, all submissions of the papers for the convention should be sent to Prof. Bong-Soo Lee. Only regular members who have paid their membership fee will be accepted for the review. Particular emphasis will be placed on the relevance of the paper with the current economic and financial situation in Korea. Please make its relevance as clear as possible in the section of motivation or in the section of the implications of your paper.

The first stage of the KAEA web site is now completed. You can see this at http://econweb.tamu.edu/kaea. The directory has been updated, removing those who have moved away or who are not members of the KAEA, and most importantly, collecting e-mail addresses for easy communications among members. Please check out your addresses and other information under your name, and if any error is found, let me know. I believe that the directory still has some names who are not here anymore. If you are aware of any, please let me know.

The next stage is to add the information on the research areas of the members. This information is particularly useful for the members to collaborate. And also, some research institutes in Korea have asked for this information in the past. They wanted to use this in case they have a project or a need for consultation with the KAEA members. Please send me the relevant information (areas of specialization, list of publications/research papers, and current research topics).

Related to this issue is the linkage to individual web sites. This may be very useful for those who have their own web site because the amount of personal information we can post on the KAEA web site is limited. Please send me your own web address. I will see if I can add that to our web directory.

I am in the process of talking to the personnel of the research institutes in Korea, exploring the possibility of listing on the KAEA web site their current research areas/topics and their plans for future research. Hopefully, this would lead to finding common interests and collaboration between them and our members. If you have good suggestions about how to do this efficiently, please let me know.

As a part of membership drive, I would like to ask all of you to look around and if you know of anyone near you, who are interested in being listed on the KAEA web directory, please ask the person to send me an email to hwang@econ.tamu.edu.