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| China-Japan-Koreas |
| Why North Korea Didn't Collapse |
| 2004-10-09 |
| The Carter/Clinton/Albright "Agreed Framework" helped keep Kim Jong Il in power. Without the economic bribery, NK might well have folded in the 90s. This somewhat long article provides insight through the looking glass into the North Korean economy. In most of the world today, a country's defense outlays are regarded as a weight that must be shouldered by the value-adding sectors of the national economy (hence the phrase "military burden"). North Korea's leadership, however, evidently entertains the concept of a "self-sustaining" defense sector — implying that Pyongyang views its military activities as generating resources rather than absorbing them. In the enunciated view of Pyongyang's leadership, the dprk's military sector is the key to financing the recovery of the national economy. It does not require a great deal of imagination to spell out the operational details of this approach. While forswearing any appreciable export revenues from legitimate commerce with advanced market economies, North Korean policy today seems to be banking on the possibility of financing state survival by exporting strategic insecurity to the rest of the world. In part, such dividends are derived from exports of merchandise (e.g., missile sales, international transfer of wmd technology). But these revenues also depend heavily on what might be described as an export of services: in this case, military extortion services (or, perhaps better yet, "revenue-sensitive threat reduction services") based upon Pyongyang's nuclear development and ballistic missile programs. The export of strategic insecurity arguably accounts for much of the upsurge in North Korea's unexplained surfeit of imports over commercial export revenues since 1998 — especially to the extent that Western aid policies in recent years can be described as appeasement-motivated.  In an important tactical sense, that approach has enjoyed success — it has facilitated state survival under imposing constraints. |
| Posted by:RWV |