The 2012 Economics Joint Conference Held The 2012 Economics Joint Conference, the largest academic event in Korean Economics, was held on February 21st in the main and annex of Daewoo Hall at Yonsei University. This event was held in celebration of the 60th founding anniversary of the Korea Economic Institute with 51 other conferences in Economics. President of the Korea Economic Institute, Dr. Ha Seong-guen (Yonsei University), remarked that the Joint Conference has reached its 12th anniversary, creating a new tradition that 52 conferences participate in and publish 430 research articles. At one of the main events—the first full meeting, Dr. Lee Ji-soon (Seoul National University) made a request to disentangle from such narrow times and spaces such as ‘Korea’ and ‘today’. He addressed the problems of capitalism from an ethnic perspective, incorporating visions of a unified Korea. He opened his talk by saying, “South Korea has accomplished significant advancement during the past 60 years; however this advancement is insufficient in a number of ways.” He pointed out that “Korea’s national income per capita of $22,000 is not enough to enrich the lives of our citizens. Taking the extreme poverty of North Korea into consideration, it is inevitable for South Korea to continue boosting its economic growth.” Regarding welfare systems, Dr. Lee called for a concept of welfare systems that incorporate the future generation, criticizing the indiscriminate proposals that have been based on political populism. He further explicated the importance of regulating a larger share for the future, emphasizing that “policies for economic development and welfare must be mediated in both times—the present and the future—and in both spaces—South and North Korea. Dr. Jeon Ju-seong (Ewha Womans University) discussed the deterioration of income distribution, indicating that it is a structural problem that transcends progressive and conservative parties. She explained, “As the demand for national welfare magnifies in such a transitional situation like this where a political party has not established a core ideology yet, an increase in welfare populism is all that is prevalent. The dispute on selective and universal welfare was initiated from a very limited and erroneous set up of the problem.” She pointed out providing welfare funds as for the key issue in the welfare dispute. On this issue, Dr. Lee Man-woo (Korea University), the next president of the Korea Economic Institute, said that concrete plans for the funding will be disclosed at the policy seminar on March 23rd. To this, however, Dr. Lee added that the findings of Dr. Park Yu-seong’s (Korea University) research demonstrate that the national pension would likely be depleted in 2050 which is 10 years earlier than what the government predicts. He said, “Such findings highlight the necessity for welfare to react accordingly to funds as well.” There was criticism that attributed today’s crisis to having not properly recognized the conditions of reality. As a leading cause of Korea’s economic trouble today, President of the Korea International Economic Institute, Dr. Kim Jeong-sik (Yonsei University) pointed out the nation’s incompetence to establish economic policies apposite to Korea’s specific conditions. He provided a case of neglecting the abrupt expansion in wage disparity after the foreign exchange crisis in 1997, when the efficiency of market economy was underlined without taking public awareness into account. He specified that “Although we call our market a competitive one, we find prevailing monopoly structure and a lot of cases where the market does not smoothly operate due to the major economic agents’ excessive checking.” He claimed that the underestimation of the role of interest groups enervates the market’s vitality.