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Vietnam may be uniquely positioned to offer encouragement to North Korea on the issue of economic reform. Since both countries experienced a similar withdrawal of Soviet aid in the 1980s, Vietnam has more successfully reformed its economy, and experienced superior economic performance, as shown above, all the while maintaining control by the communist party. (The [...]
One of the more disturbing developments of the spring has been North Korean jamming of GPS navigation of airliners flying in and out of Incheon airport as well as ships traveling near the disputed Northern Limit Line. The North Koreans eventually stood down, but also earned a rebuke from the International Telecommunications Union, which requested [...]
We begin with corruption, one of our favorite topics. Kim Jong-un, the Magnanimous Comrade, in Greg Scarlatoiu’s parlance, announced a special amnesty for prisoners this year which Steph Haggard and Jaesung Ryu likened to a shell game. Now the Daily NK is reporting that the possibility of amnesty is being used to shake down prisoners. [...]
In a post a couple of weeks ago, I analyzed inflation in the two years since the currency reform, concluding that it was high, sustained, and in the case of food products signalled a deterioration of food security. Now GoodFriends has produced some additional data. I tend to discount their statistics–they cherry-pick what they release [...]
Transparency International recently put out their international rankings, and North Korea finished dead last, tied with Somalia for 182nd place. (For what it is worth, the US came in 24th, while South Korea placed 43rd.) The North Korean result is not entirely surprising: both our surveys of North Korean refugees as well as Chinese enterprises [...]
In our analysis of the disastrous currency conversion of 2009, we argued that the long-run swing away from economic reform after 2005 has also been associated with renewed efforts to secure the border (an objective, we should add, that is in manifest tension with the country’s stated efforts to secure foreign direct investment). This effort [...]
