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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 [...]
Having recovered from our annual tryptophan binge, some updates on stories that we have been following: Spies. Back in September, we commented on the arrest of a North Korean agent allegedly sent to assassinate outspoken North Korean defector Park Sang-hak with a poison-tipped needle. The Diplomat has since run a story on North Korea’s clumsy [...]
Yet another post on the damn pipeline? Enough already! Sorry, but it wasn’t us. We were floored when a reporter actually asked LMB about it at the Obama-Lee press conference, taking a skeptical line straight out of the Witness to Transformation blog. “If this gas line project proceeds as planned, then we would have to [...]
We have recently posted on the both the general risks associated with pipeline construction and the specific risks of the Russia-DPRK-ROK project. We are pleased to find out that we are not alone. Yonhap recently reported on a proposal made by Dr. Kwon Won-soon, an economics professor at the Hankuk University of Foreign Language (HUFS). [...]
No sooner had we posted a skeptical note on the political economy of pipelines than we appeared to be undercut by the flow of events. President Lee Myung Bak said that the pipeline project could move forward at a faster-than-expected pace. On a single day—September 15– Alexey Miller, chairman of Gazprom’s management committee, hosted separate [...]
The Russian navy will conduct joint maneuvers with its North Korean counterpart in 2012 according to Russian military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Igor Muginov. The drills will focus on refugee interdiction search and rescue. Perhaps they will practice rescuing folks like the nine North Koreans who drifted into Japanese waters and have applied for asylum. In the [...]
During their summit in late August, President Dmitry Medvedev said that Kim Jong-il had agreed to create a tripartite commission to discuss the construction of a gas pipeline to South Korea via the DPRK. This mega-deal was interpreted by some Russian analysts, including Gregory Toloraya, as a positive sign. Yet like Kaesong and Kumgang, the [...]
