Author: Rudiger Frank, University of Vienna From nuclear and missile tests and dangerous rhetoric about mutual annihilation in 2017, events on the Korean
Author: Rudiger Frank, University of Vienna
From nuclear and missile tests and dangerous rhetoric about mutual annihilation in 2017, events on the Korean Peninsula shifted to summit meetings and declarations of cooperation and denuclearisation in 2018. One explanation for this radical change is that US President Donald Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ campaign on North Korea was successful and Kim Jong-un bowed to the overwhelming pressure of economic sanctions. But neither a look at North Korea’s long-term strategy nor an evaluation of evidence on the state of its economy supports this view.
North Korea went into crisis mode after the socialist bloc’s collapse and subsequent famine in the mid-1990s. The so-called military-first ( songun) policy that arose during this period was officially ended by Kim Jong-un in 2013. It was succeeded by the byungjin line of simultaneously developing nuclear weapons and the economy. Five years later in April 2018, the byungjin line was declared a success and replaced by a policy of devoting all resources to economic development along the lines of a five-year plan that was announced at the seventh congress of the Korean Workers’ Party in 2016.
The most likely way by which North Korea would aim to achieve a rapid improvement of the economy is a form of the East Asian development model. Variations thereof could be observed in the development of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and mainland China. The existence of a strong and repressive state, a preference for import-substitution, a cheap and well-educated workforce and something that can roughly be called Confucian work ethics cannot be denied in North Korea.
But there are other crucial ingredients of the East Asian model that are so far missing in North Korea: a strong export orientation and the massive import of technology and capital.
