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Who says summer is slow? Today, we simply highlight some interesting new work on North Korea from the think-tank community.
We lead with the International Crisis Group’s report by Dan Pinkston called North Korean Succession and the Risks of Instability. The report walks through the succession, the factors that might create instability—most notably marketization and information flows—and ends with a useful summary of the institutions that hold the regime together, including the security apparatus (see also Ken Gause’s outstanding study on the topic for the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea).
Pinkston has long been skeptical of “collapsists” and so far he can still say “I told you so.” He is also skeptical that the political order is likely to generate meaningful reform, and warns against confusing Kim Jong Un’s leadership style with a change in substance. For a contrasting view on this point, John De Lury has a more hopeful take at Yale Global Online.
Over at 38North, Ruediger Frank provides a useful deconstruction of North Korean budget data, looking both at the composition of spending and overall trends in revenue and expenditure. He argues that trends in expenditure can be interpreted as a proxy for what the government thinks the path of total output looks like; as he rightly emphasizes, it cannot be taken as an actual measure of GDP because of the weakness of the statistical apparatus and important portions of the economy that are outside the state budget altogether, including the military economy and the emergent private sector. He finds that the numbers track roughly the BoK estimates of total output—although at very much higher levels—but are modest in recent years. He speculates whether this doesn’t reflect a return to more realistic fiscal accounting.
Turning to the security environment, the Korea Economic Institute has been publishing an annual Joint US-Korea Academic Studies series. The 2012 edition is out, and the first half is devoted to views of the Korean issue from around the region, with papers on South Korea, Japan, China and Russia by a well-known group of analysts (Jae Jo Chung and Taeho Kim on South Korea, Jack Pritchard, Gordon Flake, Andrew Scobeell and Gil Rozman on China, Kazuhiko Togo and Narushige Michishita on Japan and Stephen Blank on Russia). One of the themes of the papers is that leadership changes are afoot outside of North Korea as well; the papers review the year but also consider the implications of pending political turnover.
The volume also contains a useful set of papers on wider regional economic cooperation and the ongoing issue of whether the TPP is real; Ed Lincoln, Peter Petri and Hyung-Gon Jeong weigh in. Peter Petri, along with Michael Plummer and Fan Zhai, have produced one of the few papers we have seen that attempts an econometric evaluation of the welfare gains from the TPP and a broader FTA of the Asia-Pacific; the study appeared late last year as an East-West Center Working Paper. Not surprisingly, they find that going bigger yields a more substantial return, but the effects of the TPP should not be dismissed;
Finally, we close with a short note from Peter Hayes over at Nautilus, which shows that not everything informative has to be ponderous. Wittily called “South Korea’s Long Bow,” Hayes succinctly traces the history of ROK efforts to acquire a missile capability and subsequent tensions—still ongoing--with the US and the Missile Technology Control Regime over the range and payload of its arsenal. He closes with the tart observation that “some South Koreans think like North Koreans. They want missile juche.” Hayes questions the utility of pushing the limits of what the bilateral US-ROK agreement and MTCR will allow and links to a proposal by Mort Halperin for Global Asia for a regional arms control agreement that would cover nucs and missiles.
