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One persistent finding in the poverty literature is that countries' neighbors matter. Its hard to do well when those around you are struggling, particularly with civil conflicts that spill across borders; look what is currently happening in the Sahel. One of the greatest tragedies of North Korea is that it is located in a good neighborhood; all it had to do was to follow the leaders. There are a lot of ways of showing the opportunity cost of being ruled by the Kims, but we found this little long-run time-lapse of construction in Shinjuku (1969-2004) as good a way of making the point as any.
