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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 [...]
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 [...]
Back in mid-September, Yonhap reported on a little-remarked insurance program that speaks volumes about the risky nature of North-South trade. Although easily understood in political economy terms, the program suggests how hard it is to put North-South relations on a commercial footing given the political stakes—and risks–involved. In the wake of the sinking of the [...]
Yesterday, my colleague Marc Noland outlined some shenanigans at Kaesong; today, the Chinese variant. In August, we provided an overview of the Xiyang investment dispute. More information is now leaking out, as a result of a translation of a Chinese piece by the SinoNK team of Adam Cathcart and Roger Cavazos and reporting by Jane [...]
With its bloated military, numerous money-losing state-owned enterprises, and generous welfare benefits (at least for the privleged few) the North Korean state has a great demand for resources. Several recent stories revolve around a common theme of the trying to extract rents from foreigners. We start today with South Korea and the pipeline and take up some [...]
We periodically report on interesting academic research that is relevant to North Korea. In an earlier post, for example, we summarized an interesting paper by Jessica Weeks that considered why some autocracies were more conflict-prone than others (surprise, surprise: North Korea is of the conflict-prone type). We recently noticed an interesting paper by Faisal Ahmed [...]
South Koreans sometimes label Chinese investment in North Korea as “economic colonialism.” I normally discount these concerns as slightly paranoiac but a series a press reports from last week are starting to make even me wonder. First, multiple stories appeared in the Chinese and South Korean press describing an agreement between the China Overseas Investment [...]
A few weeks ago I stumbled across an article by Steven Borowiec titled “South Korean Businesses in the North Going Broke.” The thrust of the piece, which paralleled other articles that appeared during the spring, is that the policies of President Lee Myung-bak have inflicted more damage on South Korean firms than the North. Borowiec [...]
