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In RealTime posts, PIIE senior staff and colleagues discuss the fast-moving economic news, financial developments, and public policy choices confronting the United States and the world.
On Thursday March 7, the United Nations Security Council approved Resolution 2094, imposing a new round of sanctions against North Korea in response to its underground nuclear test last month. The penalties include some measures we have seen in the past–such as designating individuals and companies–but also some new curbs on North Korean trade and [...]
More than a month after North Korea fired a missile in contravention of two existing UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions, the Security Council passed UNSC Resolution 2087, condemning the use of ballistic missile technology in launch and saying the “act violated United Nations sanctions, expresses determination to take ‘significant action’ in event country proceeds with [...]
While in Korea and Japan several weeks ago, sparks flared not only over the Senkakus/Diaoyu/Diaoyutai Islands and Dokdo/Takeshima but the highly emotional issue of comfort women. As a result, we are about to have one of those quasi-natural experiments that social scientists love. Will history and politics trump economics? Or will growing interdependence pull the [...]
North Korea executed its highly anticipated missile launch and with its failure managed to achieve the second worst outcome imaginable. (The worst would have been hitting China.) The North Koreans have managed in a single stroke to not only defy the UN Security Council, the United States, and even their patron China, but also demonstrate [...]
Sanctions are a complex technology with correspondingly complex macro- and microeconomic as well as political effects. Iran is currently facing quite draconian oil-related sanctions, most notably the EU decision in January 2012, to wind down purchases of Iranian crude oil by July 1, 2012. But the country has also been hit by a wave of [...]
In the wake of the death of Kim Jong-il, there were questions as to whether anyone was in charge in Pyongyang. Now we know that someone is capable of making decisions and their first one constitutes a conciliatory (indeed, concessionary), not belligerent, gesture. The agreement does not completely freeze the North Korean nuclear program but [...]
As we discussed last week, there were rumblings from the House International Affairs Committee about the treatment of the Kaesong Industrial Complex in the context of the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement (KORUS) legislation, with Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Ca) likening it to a "slave labor camp" and Committee chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fl) and eight co-sponsors introducing [...]
Marcus Noland, coauthor of the new book Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea, is launching a new blog devoted to the topic of North Korea. In this blog, Noland and his coauthor Stephan Haggard will report on developments that they believe are germane to issues facing North Korea, as well as the larger [...]
The United Nations Security Council voted today on a new round of sanctions on North Korea. These sanctions are politically significant, particularly in signaling the changing attitude of Beijing toward developments on the peninsula. However, it is highly unlikely that the sanctions, in themselves, will have immediate effect on North Korea’s nuclear program or the [...]
According to the Rodong Sinmun, official organ of the Korean Workers Party, “The ‘Dollar Empire’ has crashed into the cellar, and the financial sector, economics sector, and of course the political sector, are all gasping for breath as they beg for foreign assistance.” The reason: astronomical expenditures on cruel, barbarous, blood-stained campaigns of mass murder to plunder Middle Eastern oil driven by Americas “limitless greed and aspiration to dominate the world” for which it will face an inevitable sentence of death.