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Sanctions are not only of interest to those engaged in the making—and watching—of foreign policy; they also are a major headache for firms that need to worry about compliance. As a result, a variety of interesting new sites have emerged that track and analyze sanctions. Among those that have been brought to our attention are [...]
Military links between North Korea and Myanmar, possibly extending to nuclear cooperation, have been a subject of significant concern to Washington. But relations between the two Asian countries have not always been so cozy. On 9 October 1983 seventeen South Koreans, including Presidential Secretary for Economic Affair Kim Jae-ik, Deputy Prime Minister and EPB head [...]
Following the formal coronation of the Kim Jong Eun in early 2012, a boomlet of optimism followed some purported statements on reform: the so-called June 28 directive (“On the Establishment of a New Economic Management System in our Own Way”) and a speech entitled ““Let Us Effect Kim Jong Il’s Patriotism and Step Up the [...]
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 [...]
NPR Morning Edition’s David Greene interviews Marcus Noland to discuss the recent reappointment of Pak Pong Ju as Premier of North Korea. Having been out of office since 2007, his return to the Premiership could be a modest signal toward economic reform, though how that squares with North Korea’s increasingly bellicose foreign policy remains to [...]
The recent round of rhetorical escalation between North Korea, South Korea and the US crested just as two political gatherings were convening: a plenum of the Workers’ Party Central Committee and the Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA), the country’s legislature. Both are top-down bodies that are used not to deliberate, but to propagate: to hand out [...]
At a conference several weeks ago at MIT, I had the chance to talk to Steve Levitsky (Department of Government at Harvard) about his current work with Lucan Way (University of Toronto) on authoritarian cohesion and durability. Levitsky and Way are the co-authors of a great book on “competitive authoritarian” regimes: intermediate regimes that are [...]
This month’s edition of the East West Center’s AsiaPacific Issues features our very own Marcus Noland’s paper: The Elusive Nature of North Korean Reform. The paper addresses prospects for reform under Kim Jong Un and addresses the likely challenges and limitations toward achieving real reform in the near future. Download the PDF here or head over to the East [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
