-----Original Message----- From: J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. <rosserjb at jmu.edu> To: lbo-talk at panix.com <lbo-talk at panix.com> Date: Friday, June 02, 2000 12:51 PM Subject: North Korea
> A few more tidbits on North Korea, as I am
>going to be unsubbing for awhile from lbo-talk
>by the end of today.
> One is that the runup to the Korean War is truly
>a profoundly complicated and confusing business.
>There were up to 450 distinct political groups operating
>in Korea during the immediate aftermath of WW II.
> Another is that reliable data is truly hard to come
>by for the North Korean economy. As of about five
>years ago, there were at least ten different sources
>estimating economic output for North Korea. The official
>North Korean sources tended to report about two to
>three times as high a level as the other sources, with the
>lowest estimates coming from some ROK sources.
> It is clear, in any case, that output has declined very
>sharply during the 1990s, and there has certainly been
>famine, with many dead, as admitted even by the North
>Korean government. The estimates range from one million
>to three million dead due to the famine, and I note that unlike
>elsewhere in the world where there are people starving to
>death there is no shooting war going on there. This is a
>profound tragedy.
> BTW, the only comparative economic systems textbook
>that has serious coverage of the North Korean economy is
>by me and Marina V. Rosser, the second edition now being
>worked on. In fact, that is what I'll be working on mostly this
>summer after I get off lbo-talk and pen-l again.
>Barkley Rosser
>http://cob.jmu.edu/rosserjb
>
>