Stephan Haggard on North Korea's Rocket Launch Failure
Behind North Korea’s Rocket Launch, Economic Turmoil
04/12/2012
Marcus Noland,
East-West Center
With global attention focused on North Korea's attempted launch today of a multi-stage rocket, it's worth also taking a look at the other claim the Pyongyang regime has long made for the imminent April 15 birth centennial of its founding leader, Kim Il-sung: emergence into economic prosperity.
Originally, the regime had declared that the country would emerge as "a strong and prosperous nation" during this time, but with that aspiration far from attainment, the goal has been relaxed recently to marking the country's "passage through the gate" to prosperity. In reality, the North Korean economy today is characterized by macroeconomic instability, widening inequality and growing corruption.
No one (including the North Korean government) knows with any true confidence the size or growth rate of the country's economy, but the consensus among outside observers is that per capita income today is lower than it was 20 years ago, and by some reckonings is only now re-attaining the level it first achieved in the 1970s.
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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.
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