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Over dinner a number of years ago, five friends ended up discussing how our families had come to the United States. In two of the five cases, their grandfathers had fled west at the outset of the First World War to avoid conscription in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian armies, respectively, eventually making it to America. I laughed [...]
Twelve years ago Kim Jong-il delivered a truly extraordinary speech, “Improving the Layout of the Field is a Transformation of Nature for the Prosperity of the Country, a Pacific Work of Lasting Significance.” Subtitled, “Talk to Officials during Field Guidance to the Development of the layout of Field in North Phyongan Province” (sic), it praises [...]
Last week, on the anniversary of the “24 May measures” undertaken in response to the shooting of a tourist at Mt. Kumgang, the sinking of the Cheonan, and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island, the Hyundai Research Institute (HRI) released a report claiming that North-South economic activity has been depressed greater than originally expected. According to [...]
We are still digesting all of the conflicting news about the Chinese fishing boat incident, and will offer an overview when some of the dust clears. But one thing is increasingly clear: the Northern Limit Line is implicated in the episode. As Chris Nelson reports from Seoul, Chinese fishing boats have exploited tension along the [...]
Most of our “not satire” entries take one of two forms: the weird things the North Koreans themselves say and do with a straight face (soccer players struck by lightening; ostrich farms; North Korea filing claims against KEDO); and the even weirder things that come out of the mouths of foreigners enamored with the place. [...]
North Korea got mention in the G8 declaration that came out of meetings at Camp David this week. But we were pleasantly surprised that the statement went beyond the nuclear and missile issues and renewed commitment to the sanctions regime. It also included specific mention not only of abductions—in line with Japanese interests—but political prisoners [...]
In a recent post, we spotlighted several important North Korean policy speeches and their particularly threatening language toward the South. Aidan Foster-Carter at Leeds has now provided the service of walking through recent North Korean invective in a bit more systematic way and tracing its origins; the analysis appears in the Comparative Connections series replete [...]
Former Congressman Tony Hall had a notable career as a legislator and activist on behalf of the world’s poor, and we have to confess, he has shamed us more than a bit. For those who don’t know about Hall, he served as a representative for Dayton for 24 years, and took a particular interest in [...]
Two common misconceptions about famines are that (1) people starve to death (2) and because there is not enough food to go around. In reality, (1) people normally succumb to other maladies before they literally starve, and (2) there is usually enough food to go around. But in market economies famine victims do not have [...]
Last week we put out a new working paper “Networks, Trust, and Trade: The Microeconomics of China-North Korea Integration.” Based on our survey of 300 Chinese enterprises doing business in North Korea, it is a follow-on to our earlier paper “Integration in the Absence of Institutions: China-North Korea Cross-Border Exchange.” A central hope of engagement [...]
