Stephan Haggard's Article on North Korea in Foreign Policy
Could North Korea Have Struck It Rich?
04/13/2012
Stephan Haggard,
Foreign Policy
Whatever the opposite of the Midas touch is, North Korea's leaders seem to have it. Located in a region where all of its neighbors have experienced remarkable economic growth, the North Korean economy has stagnated for more than two decades. For the last several years, North Korea's leadership has promised a new dawn of prosperity by April 15, 2012, the 100th birthday of the country's founding leader Kim Il Sung. Instead, the country has bounced from an avoidable famine in the mid-1990s to a disastrous currency reform in 2009 to a costly -- and failed -- missile launch earlier this week. The country now has an annual per capita income of about $1,000, roughly the same as Pakistan. Did it have to be this way?
It's not as if the North Koreans haven't thought about development. In 1998, after a famine that killed between 600,000 and a million people, Dear Leader Kim Jong Il rolled out two new concepts that have served as the core ideological and propaganda pillars of the regime ever since: "military first politics" (songun) and the objective of becoming a "strong and prosperous nation" (kang song dae guk). The latter involved achieving ideological and military as well as economic strength. The regime proved its ideological resilience by sticking with socialism and surviving the collapse of communist rule in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Testing nuclear weapons in 2006 and 2009, and a long-run missile this week, was meant to demonstrate military strength.
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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.
