Stephan Haggard on North Korea Expanding Economic Crimes
Penal System Update: Grand Amnesty or Shell Game?
02/24/2012
Stephan Haggard and Jaesung Ryu,
The Peterson Institute for International Economics
In Witness to Transformation, we argued that the North Korean regime had dramatically expanded the scope of economic crimes. These legal "reforms" permitted incarceration in labor training camps—usually for relatively short periods of time–for virtually any market-oriented activity. We speculated that one possible motive for the horrible conditions in the short-term labor camps was the desire to increase bribe prices; the more nasty incarceration is, the more detainees are willing to pay to avoid it.
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Stephan Haggard is the director of the Korea-Pacific Program at IR/PS, where he specializes in the Korean economy. In 2011 Haggard published Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea with co-author Marcus Noland, with whom he had previously authored Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform. Dr. Haggard writes the "North Korea: Witness to Transformation" blog at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
