The Impact of Sanctions on North Korea’s Foreign Trade from the Perspective of the Comparative Advantage Theory

2019 ◽  
pp. 4-15
Author(s):  
I. A. Korgun ◽  
G. D. Toloraya

The presented study analyzes the opportunities for North Korea to capitalize on its competitive advantages in foreign trade in the context of sanctions.Aim. The study aims to identify mechanisms that allow North Korea to engage in foreign trade in circumvention of UN sanctions and to analyze their impact on the national economy.Tasks. The authors analyze the structure of North Korea’s national economy, its initial competitive advantage, identify the specific features of North Korea’s foreign trade in the context of sanctions, and determine the consequences of illicit trade in circumvention of sanctions for the national economy.Methods. This study uses an interdisciplinary approach that combines the classical theory of competitive advantage with the concept of rent seeking, with the concept of rent seeking and analysis of trade flows.Results. The study shows that, despite the restrictions imposed by sanctions, North Korea strives to make the most of its advantages, such as resource availability and cheap labor, in global trade. The country builds its own export-import chains in circumvention of sanctions. These chains are rather mobile, flexible, and controlled by the elite. As a result, benefits from trade that could be evenly distributed among the population are concentrated in the hands of a narrow segment of society. ‘Rent seeking’ makes it possible to formulate the negative consequences of these processes for the North Korean economy and the international community.Conclusions. Solving the North Korean issue requires an economic transformation in the country through the replacement of restrictive sanctions with more constructive ones. The exclusion of North Korea from open global trade leads to the country’s marginalization and impairs the transparency of international commodity flows.

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-203
Author(s):  
Patricia GOEDDE

AbstractThis article asks how legal mechanisms are employed outside of North Korea to achieve human rights diffusion in the country; to what extent these result in human rights diffusion in North Korea; and whether measures beyond accountability can be pursued in tandem for more productive engagement. Specifically, it examines how the North Korean government has interacted with the globalized legal regime of human rights vis-à-vis the UN and details the legal processes and implications of the UN Commission of Inquiry report, including domestic legislation, and evidence collection. While transnational legal mobilization has gathered momentum on the accountability side, it is significantly weaker in terms of achieving human rights protection within North Korea given the government’s perception of current human rights discourse as part of an externally produced war repertoire. Thus, efforts to engage the North Korean population and government require concurrent reframing of human rights discourse into more localized and relatable contexts.


2009 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-110
Author(s):  
Byung Jong Lee

Because newspaper readers or television viewers cannot directly experience or witness events that are happening in foreign countries, they have to rely heavily on foreign correspondents for their perspectives on the world. But the views of foreign correspondents can never be fully objective. Their views are often shaped by the government policies of the countries their companies belong to. Also, their attitudes are affected by the editorial policies of the companies they work for. Particularly for such controversial issues as North Korea, foreign correspondents' viewpoints are highly influenced by their government and company policies. The question is how foreign correspondents react when their government foreign policy is different from their company editorial policy. To examine the impact of government and company policies on the attitudes of foreign correspondents, this paper interviewed eight foreign correspondents covering North Korea. The results show government foreign policy and company editorial policy strongly influence the foreign correspondents' attitudes toward the North.


2021 ◽  
Vol 03 (05) ◽  
pp. 281-293
Author(s):  
Abeer Muhammad JASSIM

The exchange rate is one of the important tools that are used to protect ‎the local economy from expected shocks, so the research focused on the ‎subject of the impact of this variable on the balance of payments ‎because these two variables have a very close relationship, which ‎consequently affects foreign trade and the structure of the national ‎economy, especially in Iraq, and contributes to treating various ‎imbalances of the local economy and restore balance and stability to ‎most of its associated variables. Keywords: Economy, Iraqi Balance, Local Economy


2004 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Noland

North Korea has been in a food emergency for more than a decade and in the 1990s experienced a famine that may have claimed one million lives. The crisis is distinguished by its protracted nature, and although conditions have eased somewhat in recent years, the situation remains precarious, and the country could lapse back into famine. This paper reviews the origins of the North Korean food crisis, the impact of the 1990s famine, and the prospects for resolution of the emergency in light of economic reforms initiated in 2002 and the subsequent diplomatic confrontation over the country's nuclear weapons program.


Author(s):  
Marina N. Khramova ◽  
◽  
Sergey V. Ryazantsev ◽  

The paper provides some results of a study of changes that have occurred in the labor markets of Russian regions during the "first" and "second" waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, it is shown that in 2020 — 2021 there were transformations in the structure of employment of the population of the Russian regions, for example, the number of vacancies in the industries that were most severely affected by the introduction of restrictive measures in the economy decreased, the unemployment rate increased significantly. The negative consequences of the pandemic in one way or another manifested themselves in all Russian regions. However, in a number of regions, which even before the pandemic showed an unstable dynamics of socio-economic development, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic had a more significant negative impact. This indicates that during a pandemic, divergence processes have intensified in the national economy. At the same time, during the pandemic, some new forms of employment were developed, associated with the need to switch to a remote mode of work. We believe that these new forms of employment will remain relevant both in Russian and international practice even after the end of the pandemic. The paper also analyzes the main measures of state support for the population, small and medium-sized businesses, and migrants. It is shown that, in general, the measures of state support during the pandemic were timely and made it possible to avoid the collapse of the national economy. It is concluded that support measures should be more regionally differentiated in order to take into account the specifics of the economy of the regions of the Russian Federation.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Verfaillie ◽  
Francisco J. Doblas-Reyes ◽  
Markus G. Donat ◽  
Nuria Pérez-Zanón ◽  
Balakrishnan Solaraju-Murali ◽  
...  

<p>Decadal climate predictions and forced climate projections both provide potentially useful information to users for the next ten years. They only differ in the former being initialised with observations, while the latter is not. Bringing together initialised decadal climate predictions and non-initialised climate projections in order to provide seamless climate information for users over the next decades is a new challenging area of research. This can be achieved by comparing the forecast quality of global initialised and non-initialised simulations in their common prediction time horizons (up to 10 years ahead), and quantify in how far initialisation improves the forecast quality. Forecast quality has been usually explored through skill assessment. However, the impact of initialisation on the reliability, which quantifies the agreement between the predicted probabilities and observed relative frequencies of a given event, of decadal predictions has not yet been investigated sufficiently. Hence, users of probabilistic predictions are particularly sensitive to the potential lack of reliability which would imply that the probabilities are not trustworthy and this can have negative consequences for decision-making. In this communication, initialised decadal hindcasts (or retrospective forecasts) from 12 forecasting systems of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 are compared to the corresponding non-initialised historical simulations in terms of reliability over their common period 1961-2005. We show that reliability varies greatly depending on the region or model ensemble analysed and on the correction applied. In particular, the North Atlantic and Europe stand out as regions where there is some added-value of initialised decadal hindcasts over non-initialised historical simulations in terms of reliability, mainly because of smaller biases and/or a better representation of the trend. Furthermore, we show that post-processed data display more reliable results, indicating that bias correction and calibration are fundamental to obtain reliable climate information.</p>


2009 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melinda T. McHenry ◽  
Brian R. Wilson ◽  
Peter V. Lockwood ◽  
Christopher N. Guppy ◽  
Brian M. Sindel ◽  
...  

Woody vegetation thickening occurs in agri-ecosystems worldwide, often with negative consequences for production. Dense Callitris glaucophylla (Joy Thomps. & L.A.S. Johnson) stands affect landscapes across NW NSW, Australia, and strategies to reduce tree density to levels which maintain biodiversity values alongside agricultural production are currently being sought. We investigated soil chemical and groundcover patterns associated with individual small and large C. glaucophylla trees at six sites of variable management history and lithology in NW NSW, Australia. We posed two questions: (1) do individual C. glaucophylla trees impose patterns on soil and groundcover (soil extractable P, C, N, S and pH, litter biomass, litter P and pasture cover), and, (2) if patterns exist, do they differ between tree sizes? Results showed that extractable P, C and pH decreased away from trees of both sizes, but significantly higher values were recorded adjacent to the stem of large trees. Litter biomass exhibited a strong site-related trend independent of soil variables. Positive correlations between litter and soil variables existed for some sites and not others, indicative of processes such as grazing which contribute to the transport of litter away from the tree. Irrespective of tree size ground-storey vegetation cover increased significantly away from the stem, presumably as a consequence of competition for soil water. Further results indicated that single C. glaucophylla trees enrich soils in patterns analogous to other species in similar environments worldwide. However, localised soil improvements must be weighed up against the negative effects of decreased groundcover associated with trees, and the potential for the species to re-seed prolifically into managed paddocks. Future research will discern the impact of individual C. glaucophylla trees at higher densities, where soil patterning may be modified by intense within-stand competition.


2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-94
Author(s):  
CHOI LYONG

AbstractThis article discusses the impact and implications of Sino-American reconciliation on South Korea's policy towards its conflict with North Korea as well as its effect on South Korean politics in the early 1970s. Specifically, this article will examine how the Park regime altered its policy toward the North in response to the demands of the Nixon administration, before discussing the limitations of the policy in terms of the hostile approach of the Park regime toward Pyongyang during its talks with North Korea in 1972.Based on recent findings in the South Korean and American archives, and an interview with former KCIA official Gang Indeok, this article contends that this particular focus provides an interesting case study to explain the impact of global changes on the domestic politics of specific nation(s) during the Cold War era. Along with many other American client states, the Republic of Korea misunderstood the objective of the United States before Nixon announced his Doctrine in 1969 and intention to reduce American support for Park. To be sure, it was not Washington's intention to build a democratic country in the Korean Peninsula. Rather, as Westad has indicated, the superpower sought greater control over the world and the expansion and extension of its power. This short article will thus demonstrate the process by which the client states of the United States—in particular, South Korea—came to understand the real aims of Washington and learned how to utilize these American intentions for their own national interest.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (21) ◽  
pp. 11854
Author(s):  
Jozef Klucka ◽  
Rudolf Gruenbichler ◽  
Jozef Ristvej

The routine approach used in risk management is based on the scheme that within the prevention period an organisation or a state prepares for the expected risks and once the risks occur, resources and internal procedures are implemented to mitigate their negative consequences. The objective of the paper is to analyse risk management and its constraints, its application in COVID-19 period and based on it provide mitigating strategies for specific problems/risks related to COVID-19. The research methods related to the topics are: (a) study of books, newspapers and other internet resources and (b) interviews with COVID-19 managers at district and regional level in the north of Slovakia. The proposals for mitigation strategies are based on the basic assumption relevant for COVID-19 that there are risks with unknown probability and unknown consequences. Therefore, the mitigation strategies are adapted to the current situation, which includes lack of data and know-how, lack of experience, political and economic unrest and social problems. The impact of constraints is based on an ad-hoc or unplanned and clearly structured approach. Problems and risks are identified and mitigation strategies are proposed. The proposed measures (quantitative/qualitative) should be evaluated and via benchmarking the development and efficiency of applied measures monitored and assessed. The output of identified risk-known and –unknown creates a framework for implementation.


Author(s):  
Natallia Shalupayeva

Nowadays, economic diversification remains a key challenge for most developing countries. The world trading system is developing from universal liberalization to increased protectionism which imposes additional difficulties in countries’ exports development and puts export diversification at the heart of a strategy for economic diversification. China's foreign trade is also in a critical period of rapid development and transformation at present. China is building a new pattern of integration into the world economic system, but its economic transformation is not smooth and faces problems. Taking into account China’s high reliance on exports, one of the most important threat to China’s economic development – the susceptibility to fluctuations in global economy – is largely due to a low level of Chinese exports diversification. In order to achieve a more sustainable long-term economic growth and hedge against the impact of external shocks China needs to diversify its exports markets, range of exported products and trade methods. Purpose. The purpose of the article is the research of practical aspects of exports diversification in China, identification of features and problems of China’s exports product and market diversification, diversification of trade methods and high-tech products exports diversification. Methodology. The methodological basis of the study is presented by the theories of foreign trade and industrial policy, as well as by the researches realized in the field of exports diversification. The information basis of the study are the databases of UNCTAD, WTO and National Bureau of Statistics of China. General scientific methods, systematic approach, economic-statistical methods are used in the research. Findings. An analysis of China’s exports diversification was realized in the article, including revealing of features and problems of China’s exports product and market diversification, diversification of trade methods and high-tech products exports diversification, as well as identification of some driving effects of China’s exports diversification on its economic development and substantiation of the significance to improve its export diversification strategy in order to reduce economic risks and promote the sustainable development of foreign trade.


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