North Korean Reform: Politics, economics and security

This Adelphi examines the tension in North Korea between a military-first ideology and the need for economic reform, looking at the leadership debate from which this has emerged and how this is transforming the country.

• Introduction

  In recent years, analysis concerning the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), or North Korea, has focused primarily on whether it has nuclear weapons or whether it has embarked on a programme of ‘real’ economic reform. There is a vague sense that the two issues may be linked in some way, a linkage usually assumed to take the form of nuclear ‘chips’ the North Koreans may choose to play at...

• Chapter One: Debate and Policy Formation

  The very idea of debate in Pyongyang strikes many observers as implausible. However, it should come as no surprise that even within the North Korean leadership there are differences of opinion, sometimes merely over questions of tactics, but at other times over more fundamental issues. Not all decisions are equally open to question and, even for those decisions on which there can be differences, there may only be limited opportunities...

• Chapter Two: The Way Things Were

  Within North Korea, decisions about the economy have always been intensely political. They were intertwined with ideological discourse in the communist world, woven into the fabric of the Sino-Soviet confrontation (which Pyongyang could not ignore and to which it had to respond) and connected to internal arguments over national independence versus integration into larger, primarily Soviet-bloc economic systems. Before the Sixth Workers' Party Congress of October 1980 introduced a sweeping...

• Chapter Three: Preparation for Economic Reform

  Most analysis of contemporary North Korean economic reforms focuses heavily on the particulars of specific measures, but does not investigate closely the process through which the reforms have emerged.1 Yet, at this early stage, it is as much the process by which the new economic measures emerge as the details of the measures themselves that can tell us something about the seriousness and sustainability of the reforms launched by Kim Jong...

• Chapter Four: The Debate in Bloom

  By late September 2002, just before a high-level US delegation finally arrived in Pyongyang, there appeared to be an uneasy stalemate within the leadership as to how the reforms would affect economic priorities, especially that afforded to the military sector. This stalemate could not last; there was bound to be a fight. It could have turned into a demonstration of the typical life cycle of new North Korean economic ideas—nasty, brutish and...

• Chapter Five: Implications and Conclusions

  It will almost certainly not be clear for some years whether North Korea's most profound economic reform programme, begun in 2002, will succeed. Overall, while growth in the North Korean economy has been positive since 1999 and predates the reform package, this has occurred largely because of assistance from China, South Korea and other foreign sources. The annual growth rate of 2% falls far short of other so-called ‘economies in...

Robert L. Carlin is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University.

Joel S. Wit is a Senior Associate of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Washington DC.