Nah. Let me throw in a few new points. One great irony of the whole Korean business is that South Korea essentially imitated North Korea in order to catch up to it and surpass it economically. As noted in somebody's earlier post, in the aftermath of the Korean War, North Korea initially did much better than did South Korea, which was run by the corrupt and incompetent Syngman Rhee. Even if one discounts for the usual overstatements, it is clear that North Korea grew much more rapidly in the 1950s and into the early 1960s than did South Korea.
Two things changed this. One was that North Korea had been strongly supported by both USSR and PRC. When they fell out, North Korea was a victim. Kim Il Sung developed his "juche" philosophy of self-reliant "Kimilsungism," but it did not make up for the loss of assistance and the DPRK spent the next three decades bouncing back and forth between the two, while occasionally trying to slip the leash by going global, e.g. in the early 1970s, which only led to a debt collapse.
The other was that Park Chung Hee in the 1970s in the ROK imitated the North Korean economic strategy. ROK was following the indicative planning route, but in the 1970s this essentially verged on full-blown command planning. There is little doubt that of all the countries labeled as following indicative planning, such as France, Japan, and India, the ROK went closer to actual command planning than any other. This was successful and the ROK did catch the DPRK and surpass it in per capita income terms.
Of course, all through this period the ROK was no democracy in any way shape or form. The only areas where it was arguably more "liberal" than the DPRK was in freedom of religion, and for those who love capitalism, existence of private property.
Despite its current catastrophic state, as late as 1987 the DPRK was actually outperforming the ROK in various areas of agriculture, e.g. rice, wheat, and potatoes. The collapse since then has been stunning. Of course, reliable data on what is happening in the DPRK economy is simply not available. Barkley Rosser -----Original Message----- From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> To: lbo-talk <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Friday, May 26, 2000 3:37 PM Subject: NK
>The North Korea thread's getting a bit tedious, with people just
>rehashing the same material over & over. Could we bring it to a close?
>
>Doug
>