Search Results for: noland surveys

A Financial Constriction Strategy for North Korea

Although U.N. sanctions alone will be insufficient to put real pressure on Kim Jong Il, our own Treasury Department has had proven success at targeting the North Korean regime’s finances and putting the regime under severe economic strain. Unlike U.N. action alone, recent experience tells us that these measures could work. Consider what happened in the 17-month period between September 2005 and February 2007, when the Treasury Department took decisive action against North Korea’s counterfeiting of our currency. Treasury applied...

Comments: 6
July 2, 2011

Interview: Marcus Prior of the World Food Program, on Food Aid to North Korea

This week, the Christian Science Monitor’s veteran Korea correspondent, Don Kirk, reported that U.S. and South Korean officials disagree with the World Food Program’s assessment that North Korea is on the verge of a food crisis: “There’s a need, but we don’t know how great it is,” says a knowledgeable western observer. “My hunch is it’s less about a shortage of food and more about unequal distribution. You can buy rice in the markets if you have the means. He...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Interviews
December 8, 2010

If You Must Bomb, Bomb Their Palaces

Now that Victor Cha has written that another Korean War is a very real possibility, that risk has become a matter of accepted conventional wisdom. Some in South Korea seem to be waiting for an excuse to restore deterrence through bombing. This is probably a mix of bluff and bluster, but there’s no arguing with South Korea’s right to self-defense and its need to restore deterrence. A lot of unthinkable things have already happened this year, and I certainly hope...

Categories Korean War II/NK Military/North-South/ROK Military
May 24, 2010

Overthrowing Kim: A Capitalist Manifesto

[Originally published at The New Ledger, May 2010; edited for brevity in October 2017] Within the next 48 hours, South Korea is expected to announce that North Korea torpedoed and sank the warship Cheonan and killed 46 of her crew. Among the evidence the multinational investigation will cite will be the North Korean serial number on the torpedo’s propeller, recovered from the ocean floor. The sinking of the Cheonan may be the most serious North Korean provocation since 1968 —...

Categories Capitalism/Regime Change
April 9, 2010

North Korea and China Feast Amid Famine

As the food situation in North Korea continues to deteriorate for its most vulnerable, a South Korean NGO is sending 300 tons of flour and other supplies to help feed 12,000 “marginalized” people, including kids in 50 orphanages. The article mentions nothing about monitoring or nutritional surveys, so pray to a God they can’t that there will be a few dollops of gruel left for their begging bowls after all of the theft, diversion, and corruption. Note, by the way,...

Categories Appeasement/China & Korea/Famine & Food Aid/Six-Party Talks
April 5, 2010

Götterdämmerung Watch

Writing in Foreign Policy, Marcus Noland writes about discontent and dissent in North Korea, and the impact of The Great Confiscation as a catalyst for it. The surveys’ results suggest that the regime’s discomfort might be well founded. Countries such as North Korea, where people routinely hide their true opinions, are prone to sudden, explosive political mobilizations like the ones that swept Eastern and Central Europe in the late 1980s. Those mobilizations happen when nascent expressions of discontent cascade —...

Categories NK Economics/Propaganda/Regime Change/Subversion
March 24, 2010

Fear and Loathing Across the Tumen, Part 2

Two new reports today describe the accelerating outing of dissent in North Korea. The first, from the Washington Post’s Blaine Harden, cites this new study by Marcus Noland based on surveys of refugees from 2008, this study by the International Crisis Group, which I’d previously blogged, and more recent reports since The Great Confiscation: There is mounting evidence that Kim Jong Il is losing the propaganda war inside North Korea, with more than half the population now listening to foreign...

Categories NK Economics/Resistance
January 7, 2010

North Korea Descending Into Economic Chaos

I’ve long believed that functionally, there were two North Korean economies — a mostly capitalist (and to the U.N., illicit) “palace” economy that funds Kim Jong Il’s regime, and an increasingly capitalist (and to Kim Jong Il, illicit) “peoples’ economy” that rose from the ashes of the failed Public Distribution System. Some say that international food aid ended the Great Famine, a famine that may have killed millions of North Koreans. There is some truth in this, but international food...

Categories NK Economics/Uncategorized
December 3, 2009

3 December 2009 (Updated)

THE GREAT CONFISCATION CONTINUES. The Wall Street Journal reports that in Pyongyang, the exchange has been “calm and orderly,” at least to the extent foreign observers have been able to tell. Meanwhile, the Daily NK explains who will be hurt most badly by this. If markets are damaged as badly as I suspect they might be, there could be a new flood of food refugees into China this winter. Another effect will be the final collapse of confidence by the...

Categories Anju Links/NK Economics/NK Military/North-South
October 8, 2009

Your Money or Your Life: WaPo on North Korea’s Gulag Shake Down

The Washington Post’s terrific Blaine Harden has written a must-read story, based in large part on the research of Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard, about an ugly new turn of events in North Korea’s gulag system. North Korea’s infamous penal system, which for decades has silenced political dissent with slave labor camps, has evolved into a mechanism for extorting money from citizens trading in private markets, according to surveys of more than 1,600 North Korean refugees. Reacting to an explosive...

Categories Human Rights/The Camps
October 26, 2008

Once Again, Kim Jong Il Starves the People; Once Again, World Doesn’t Know How to Respond

Recently, I was arguing with an influential supporter of a soft-line approach to North Korea about food aid.  Generally, we both supported the provision of food aid, and both of us acknowledged that the regime would use every means at its disposal to divert that aid to loyalists, high-ranking cadres, and the military. We agreed that Kim Jong Il doesn’t see the lives of all North Koreans as having equal value. We diverged when it came to what U.S. policy...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
May 28, 2008

U.S. Food Aid to North Korea: Two Steps Back, One Step Forward

For those of you who do not know him, Marcus Noland of the Peterson Institute for International Economics is  a leading expert and author  on the North Korean economy and  food crisis.  Noland writes in to  report that he has learned some details of the U.S. government’s negotiations with the North Koreans on food aid.  The  negotiations have resulted in an agreement (for now) on food aid to the North, something I personally support for overriding humanitarian reasons notwithstanding my...

Categories Famine & Food Aid

North Korea’s Largest Concentration Camps on Google Earth

The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea estimates that North Korea holds as many as 120,000 people in its system of concentration and detention camps, and that 400,000 people have died in these camps from torture, starvation, disease, and execution. These reports, in the context of estimates that North Korea has allowed between 600,000 and 2,500,000 of its people to starve to death while its government squandered the nation’s resources on weapons and luxuries for its ruling elite, suggest that...

Comments: 127
August 24, 2007

“Famine in North Korea”: An Interactive Review (3 of 3)

[OFK:  In this post, Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard respond to  Part 1 and Part 2 of my  review of their book, “Famine in North Korea:  Markets, Aid, and Reform.”] Josh Stanton has written by far the most thoughtful and cogent analysis of Famine in North Korea that we have seen to date. Stanton’s review is generous, but also raises important questions about virtually all elements of our analysis. In the interest of furthering both scholarly and policy debate, we...

Categories Books & Films/Famine & Food Aid
August 22, 2007

“Famine in North Korea:” An Interactive Review (1 of 3)

The time stamp on this post may be the most telling part of it, for I first got my hands on Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard’s “Famine in North Korea:  Markets, Aid, and Reform” back in late March.  The intervening months have been very busy for me, and the book raised more points of discussion than I can cover here.  Noland and Haggard  are two of the finest, most respected scholars of all things North Korean and economic, and their...

Categories Books & Films/Famine & Food Aid
May 19, 2005

One Kwangju Per Day for Six Years

Lately, I’ve been researching some of the different death toll figures for the North Korean famine–the one that peaked in the 1990’s, continues to this day, and which the WFP now says is threatening to reemerge. Here’s a summary: The most often-cited estimate of the death toll is two million. A 1999 CNN report estimated that by then, the famine had already killed two million people. The North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004 includes a toll of two million...

Categories Uncategorized
May 19, 2005

One Kwangju Per Day for Six Years

Lately, I’ve been researching some of the different death toll figures for the North Korean famine–the one that peaked in the 1990’s, continues to this day, and which the WFP now says is threatening to reemerge. Here’s a summary: The most often-cited estimate of the death toll is two million. A 1999 CNN report estimated that by then, the famine had already killed two million people. The North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004 includes a toll of two million...

Categories Uncategorized
May 18, 2005

G.W. Bush’s Double-Dog Dare

Little Joshua’s illness started to crowd out my blogging time when I first noticed this link (HT: The Marmot). It’s just too good not to reproduce some choice, succulent portions. Aside from having a solid grasp of what the regional players are thinking, Mac Johnson writes so well he gives me acute writer’s envy: In its latest major accomplishment as an industrial power, North Korea has dug a really big hole. Usually such a hole would be filled with the...

Categories Uncategorized