North and South Korea should unify their economies while maintaining separate political systems, South Korean unification minister Lee In-young said on Thursday.

“Our approach now should aim more at the ‘one people, two countries, two systems, and one market’ model,” Lee told South Korea’s Seoul Shinmun newspaper, pointing to the European Union as an example of a similar system.

The existence of two separate markets competing with one another will lead to South Korea exploiting the North, Lee said. South Korea’s gross domestic product (GDP) is more than 50 times larger than North Korea’s, according to KOSTAT (Statistics Korea).

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