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For those of you who can’t wait for summer because it allows you to catch up on your North Korea reading, we will be blogging on some books that have stacked up by our desks over the next few weeks. First up is Daniel Schwekendiek’s socioeconomic history of the country. Although it covers familiar ground, it provides a variety of statistics on the country. Some of these are interesting, such as county-level data from a 2002 survey on the share of households who had eaten meat the day before (far higher on the West Coast than the East). Others are of the “caveat emptor” variety (physical output under the succession of the country’s economic plans). Still others require interpretation. For example, as Schwekendiek notes, North Korea has a very high number of doctors and hospital beds per capita. But this reflects a failing rather than successful health care system. Lack of resources means that the government is unable--and perhaps unwilling--to invest in complementary inputs, including medicines and other basic technologies, such as X-rays.
Schwekendiek’s most interesting contribution, published in a succession of other papers and summarized in this volume, is on anthropometric evidence on the divergence between North and South. The book has a very useful catalogue of 25 anthropometric and nutritional surveys carried out since 1987 (p. 102-3), either within the country or of refugees. The references are also useful since the analysis of these surveys often appears in relatively obscure journals.
Drawing on a number of the more creditable surveys from the late famine period through the recovery of the early 2000s, Schwekendiek concludes that the difference in height between pre-school South and North Korean boys in the immediate post-famine period was between 4 and 8 centimeters and between 3 and 8 centimeters for girls. Weight differences for boys in this age cohort were between one and three kilos for both boys and girls. These differences are narrower than Nick Eberstadt’s parsing of the data from a 1998 survey in his book on The North Korean Economy. But for children of that age they are enormous.
A complaint about the book has to do with the availability of the data, an issue for the surveying organizations and North Korean authorities as much as for Schwekendiek. For example, the author challenges our speculation in Famine in North Korea that at least some of the data from a pivotal 2002 survey may have been fabricated by North Korean counterparts given the low levels of some malnutrition measures in the wake of the great famine. (He does however note another important mechanism through which such data might be biased, however: the self-censoring of embarrassing answers on the part of survey respondents). Schwekendiek claims to undertake a number of reliability tests of the data and rejects our speculation. Unfortunately, when we requested the data in order to replicate his results, neither the author nor the WFP were willing to provide it.
As a matter of principle, the international organizations operating in North Korea should adhere to the principle that survey data that is, in effect, collected at taxpayer expense be made widely available to researchers. We are happy to be proven wrong. But it is impossible to counter claims when the data is privately held. As noted: caveat emptor.
