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The second part of my interview with Steve Weisman has been posted. In it, Steve asks how we might get out of this mess. North Korea’s call yesterday for foreigners (and foreign business) to flee South Korea was a transparent attempt to put pressure on South Korean President Park Geun-hye by undermining the South Korean economy. [...]
In any contest of resolve, weaker parties seek to show they can bear costs. If that signal was missed by anyone over the last several weeks, Kim Jong Un has just delivered it again. A statement by Kim Yang Gon, secretary of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, announced the withdrawal of [...]
The North Koreans have now moved their effort to show resolve to Kaesong. Tomorrow, we will look at recent events there more closely, but they seem to us like a perfect example of shooting yourself in the foot. Today at Foreign Policy, I complement Marc Noland’s interview by asking whether the effort to combine the [...]
We are always interested in new sources of material on North Korea, and thus were pleased to come on New Focus International. A distinctive feature of New Focus is that it is run by North Koreans “in exile,” as they site puts it nicely; the choice of words suggests the promise of return. The editor-in-chief [...]
As I mentioned in an earlier post, Steph Haggard and I have been updating earlier work on North Korea’s balance of payments in connection with a forthcoming book tentatively titled Hard Target: Sanctions, Inducements, and the North Korea Problem. Given the significant uncertainty about many components of the North Korean balance of payments–revenues from illicit [...]
In a previous post I reviewed some recent research coming out of KDI on the distribution of income in North Korea. A team from KINU has put out a new study based on 41 in-depth interviews with North Korean refugees on quality of life issues that can be read as a kind of companion piece. [...]
A couple of months ago, the KDI School of Public Policy and Management put out a paper by Kim Taejong and Kim Ji-Hong which uses a 2005 KDI survey of 700 North Korean refugees to generate estimates of the distribution of income in North Korea, focusing on the period 1996-2003. Kim and Kim are well-aware [...]
North Korea watchers—ourselves included—spend too much time reading muddy tea leaves and too little time thinking about how to model the country’s political economy. There is, however, an increasingly robust research program on the political economy of authoritarian regimes, and in coming posts we are beginning a new feature—Academic Sources—that reaches out beyond the standard [...]
Elsewhere, we documented the cycles of rhetorical—and actual–escalation that followed the missile tests of 2006 and 2009. We found the 2013 version of this dance to be even more vitriolic than in the past, including threats of direct attacks on the US and South Korea. But we thought it would be worthwhile to briefly sum [...]
When I visited Rason in 1997, I was struck by how fresh the air and how beautiful the night skies were. Given the dearth of outdoor recreational opportunities in northeast Asia, I mused that maybe the North Koreans might be better off in the long-run by preserving the wilderness rather than by developing an industrial park. [...]
