Stephan Haggard on North Korea's Parliament
North Korean Assembly Might Offer Clues to New Leader's Direction
09/25/2012
Evan Ramstad,
Wall Street Journal
A meeting Tuesday of North Korea's rubber-stamp legislature might provide the clearest signals yet of the direction in which new dictator Kim Jong Eun is trying to take the country.
The approximately 700 members of the Supreme Peoples' Assembly will gather in Pyongyang for the second time this year, a rare development for a body that went four years in the 1990s without meeting.
Two years ago, Mr. Kim made his public debut at an assembly gathering. And when the body met this spring, it bestowed on him the last of several titles that legitimized his succession.
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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.
