Future of North Korea Economy: Politics over Economic Policy
Future of North Korea Economy: Politics Over Economic Policy
The terms starvation, isolation, totalitarianism, and nuclear ambitions combined would remind most people the hermit kingdom in East Asia, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and its Kim dynasty. After the demise of the aged dictator Kim Jong Il in December 2011, the country went through a period of mourning the death of their “beloved” Great General and, undergoing a power succession to his 29-year-old son, Kim Jong Un. He has been known to have attended a Swiss school in his childhood years, enjoying playing basketball and video games (Yan & Shubert, 2011). However, even though many outsiders have a hopeful outlook on this young dictator to be somewhat liberal in both economic and political perspectives, analyzing the situation through levels of analysis suggests that he is unlikely to be any different than his predecessors. In fact, because maintaining the nation’s authoritarian Kim dynasty and communist political system is the most important objective for North Korea, he will probably continue to put low priority on economy, defying international norms as a totalitarian nation of a closed, rigidly planned economy.
The Three Levels Explained
The levels-of-analysis is an approach conceptualized by Kenneth Waltz in his book Man, the State, and War to understand global politics through categorizing different factors shaping states’ behaviors (Ray, 2001). The approach can be categorized in to three levels: the individual level, which emphasizes the roles played by individual leaders, nation-state level, focusing on interaction between various actors under the nation’s political system and culture, and the system level, addressing distribution of power in the international system (Dorff, 2004). Although levels-of-analysis problem, regarding limitation and vagueness of integrating units, is an ongoing issue according to James Lee Ray (2001), the levels can be integrated more simply in to
The terms starvation, isolation, totalitarianism, and nuclear ambitions combined would remind most people the hermit kingdom in East Asia, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and its Kim dynasty. After the demise of the aged dictator Kim Jong Il in December 2011, the country went through a period of mourning the death of their “beloved” Great General and, undergoing a power succession to his 29-year-old son, Kim Jong Un. He has been known to have attended a Swiss school in his childhood years, enjoying playing basketball and video games (Yan & Shubert, 2011). However, even though many outsiders have a hopeful outlook on this young dictator to be somewhat liberal in both economic and political perspectives, analyzing the situation through levels of analysis suggests that he is unlikely to be any different than his predecessors. In fact, because maintaining the nation’s authoritarian Kim dynasty and communist political system is the most important objective for North Korea, he will probably continue to put low priority on economy, defying international norms as a totalitarian nation of a closed, rigidly planned economy.
The Three Levels Explained
The levels-of-analysis is an approach conceptualized by Kenneth Waltz in his book Man, the State, and War to understand global politics through categorizing different factors shaping states’ behaviors (Ray, 2001). The approach can be categorized in to three levels: the individual level, which emphasizes the roles played by individual leaders, nation-state level, focusing on interaction between various actors under the nation’s political system and culture, and the system level, addressing distribution of power in the international system (Dorff, 2004). Although levels-of-analysis problem, regarding limitation and vagueness of integrating units, is an ongoing issue according to James Lee Ray (2001), the levels can be integrated more simply in to
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