 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
By now, the satellite pictures of North Korea at night have become a virtual cliche; nonetheless, they are always worth a second look and we append a new one including Japan and more of China that we had not seen. However, we found the attached photo from Mark Manyin at the Congressional Research Service to [...]
We were recently asked by a reporter whether it was possible that products from Kaesong are leaking into Korea’s trade with third countries. We were initially dismissive, and then decided that we actually didn’t know. What does Kaesong export, anyway? And where is final demand? The data we present here are pretty aggregated (the so-called [...]
We have a standing interest in sanctions: when they work and when they don’t. We have followed the sanctions efforts vis-à-vis Iran in particular, as it is the only current comparator case to North Korea: a regime that thrives on posing nuclear challenges to the rest of the world. VOX has recently posted a short [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
North Korea has long engaged in illicit activities of various sorts including counterfeiting, smuggling, drug trafficking, insurance fraud and so on. The importance of these activities to the North Korean economy is often exaggerated—attributing to North Korea revenues based on the “street prices” for drugs that go through multiple hands before reaching the final consumers, [...]
Last month the Wilson Center’s North Korea International Documentation Project put out a fascinating new paper, “New Evidence on North Korean Economic Planning, 1962-1978.” The title is misleading: little attention in the 11 translated mostly Eastern European diplomatic documents is addressed to planning per se, though there is considerable material on the nature of North [...]
Two items that came into our inbox over the summer are indicative of continuing shifts in the geostrategic and economic landscape. One focused on mil-mil relations between Seoul and Beijing; the other on the rapidly evolving relationship between the ROK and India. In combination, the stories show the complexity of the emerging security architecture as [...]
The common theme of this “slave to the blog” post are some new things on North Korea’s foreign economic relations. We start with a new report on sanctions from the Federation of American Scientists (in pdf) by Daniel Wertz—on staff with with the National Committee on North Korea (their useful website is here)—and Ali Vaez, [...]
