North Korea’s Economy: Does Change Equal Reform?

The experts agree that North Korea’s economy has changed in the years since it shed a couple of million people, give or take a million. There’s some consensus that the survivors have learned to trade, and that markets have grown. There’s also some consensus that regime officials are participating to a degree. There ends the consensus: some claim that reform is again afoot; others claim that change is driven by necessity, and that official participation is mostly a matter of individual (and widespread) corruption taking over where the command economy has has stopped.

Tonight, Joel Wit, a former State Department official of the Sunshine school of thought, will try to convince an audience at the U.S.-Korea Institute that on a recent visit to North Korea, he saw signs of reform. Don Oberdorfer will also talk about Kaesong, and how it has changed. I’ll have to miss it, since I barely have time to write this blog, but it’s tonight at 6, at the Rome Auditorium, 1619 Massachusetts Avenue. There’s a reception at 5:30, and my good friend Jae Ku will moderate. RSVP to nbaillis@jhu.edu.

Andrei Lankov’s view, articulated in Foreign Affairs, makes a lot more sense to me. I especially liked this argument:

Liberalization would have other challenging side effects as well. Adjusting to the market’s demands would drive the North Koreans to pay less attention to party rituals and focus more on making money. The government would have to tolerate information exchange, travel between different areas of the country, and the growth of horizontal connections beyond its direct control. One cannot run a successful business in a country where it is illegal to leave one’s place of residence without a travel permit issued by the police. []