TOKYO, Wednesday, Nov. 2 - Moving closer toward their longtime goal of fielding a unified Olympic team, South and North Korea agreed in principle on Tuesday to have their athletes compete together at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

In another sign of reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula, officials from the two countries issued a short statement agreeing to a unified team after a three-hour meeting in Macao, where Korean athletes were competing in the East Asian games.

The Koreas also announced that they had agreed to compete as one team at the Asian Games in Doha, Qatar, next year.

"We have agreed to have a unified team, but we haven't agreed on the details yet," Baek Sung Il, a spokesman for South Korea's Olympic Committee, said in a telephone interview from Macao. "We have to work out the details on how to select our athletes and how to train them. It's not something we can agree on at once. But we will send unified teams to the Asian Games and to the Olympics."

Mr. Baek said that the two sides had verbally agreed during the 2004 Athens Olympics to work toward unifying their teams and have held talks on the subject since then.

After a meeting in September on combining their teams for the Asian Games went smoothly, South Korean officials approached their North Korean counterparts about the Beijing Olympics during their meeting in Macao, Mr. Baek said.

"When we suggested it, they immediately agreed to our suggestion," Mr. Baek said.

According to the three-paragraph agreement, in addition to sending unified teams to the two games, the two sides said that they would meet on Dec. 7 to iron out the details of selection and training in Kaesong, a North Korean city just north of the demilitarized zone. The vice chairman of each side's Olympic committee will head the December meeting.

The two Koreas, divided for more than a half-century, have tried to dispatch unified teams as far back as the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. They also tried for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and 1990 Beijing Asian Games, according to the South Korean news media. The North demanded that half the events of the 1988 Seoul Olympics be transferred to its capital, Pyongyang. They succeeded only in fielding a unified team for a table tennis and youth soccer tournament in the early 1990's, according to South Korean news accounts.

The agreement on the Asian Games and Olympics could, of course, founder on the details. Still, it comes at a time when the two Koreas, fierce cold-war enemies, have moved rapidly toward reconciliation since Kim Dae Jung, then the South Korean president, and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, met in Pyongyang in June 2000.

Neither side talks of actual reunification of the peninsula in the near future. South Korea, fearful that sudden reunification would damage its economy and lower its hard-won standard of living, seeks to engage the North and shrink the economic gap between the sides before aiming at reunification decades from now.

The North is also believed to be against immediate reunification, because its leaders, like those of the former East Germany, would be likely to lose their positions to their richer cousins.

But there have been concrete and symbolic steps toward reconciliation in recent years. An industrial park opened early this year in Kaesong, with South Korean financing and North Korean labor, and factories there produce everything from pots to parts for semiconductor chips.

A well-known resort, Kumgang Mountain, in eastern North Korea near the DMZ, attracts thousands of South Korean tourists a week. With Kaesong and Kumgang Mountain as destinations, South Koreans travel north every day through the once impenetrable DMZ, though North Koreans are still not allowed to visit the South.

Since the start of South Korea's "sunshine policy" toward the North, athletes from the two nations have marched together at the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Sydney Olympics and the Asian Games. Athletes marched under the name of Korea, instead of their countries' official names, and a flag showing an undivided peninsula. Instead of national anthems, "Arirang," a traditional love song popular on both sides of the DMZ was played.

Mr. Baek said it was likely that the two sides would hew to that pattern in the Asian and Olympic games, though neither side had addressed those issues yet.