Writing for Democratization, Kyong Jun Choi at the University of Washington reviewed New Challenges for Maturing Democracies in Korea and Taiwan (Stanford University Press, 2014), a co-edited book by Stanford professors Larry Diamond and Gi-Wook Shin.

“Among the most notable strengths of this volume is its analysis of new phenomena that have rarely been addressed in existing literature,” Choi writes.

The book seeks to illustrate different characteristics of the evolution of democracy in Taiwan and South Korea. The two countries share similar economic and political directions since industrialization took place in the 1960s and transition toward democracy began in the 1980s.

Choi says that the book “certainly stands as a stepping stone for research on new democracies struggling to consolidate democracy.”

“New Challenges” is one outcome of a multiyear research project at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, and a conference co-hosted with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law in 2011.

The review is featured in Democratization’s vol. 21, issue 7. Information about accessing the review can found by clicking here.

A unified Korea is likely but it won’t come easily, said Stanford professor Gi-Wook Shin, in a recent interview with NK News. The most plausible scenario is reunification following a breakdown of the North Korean regime and eventual South Korean absorption of the North.

“Of course, I cannot predict the timing of such an occurrence, but it is likely that it will happen in the not-too-distant future,” said Shin, director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, in a Q&A among a panel of experts on inter-Korean relations.

In the event of unification, Shin says he is convinced it will be on South Korean terms. He said he doubts that the North Korean government, led by leader Kim Jong-Un and the ruling Worker’s Party of Korea, would find a role in South Korea’s democratic system.

Shin heads a multiyear research project focused on understanding the domestic and global implications of North Korea’s future. Earlier this year, he coauthored a policy brief assessing the situation and policy context on the Korean Peninsula. The report recommends steps that the South Korean government can take to engage North Korea toward the ultimate goal of Korean unification and a sustainable security environment in Northeast Asia.

The full Q&A can be accessed on NK News online.

In conversation with Shorenstein APARC, Yong Lee, the SK Center Fellow, discusses his initial draw to architecture and urbanism, and the nexus of public policy and economics. Lee highlights some of his recent research activities focused on international sanctions on North Korea and educational policy as it relates to migration and housing patterns in South Korea. 

Your background is quite multifaceted, including years working in architecture and a master’s of public policy in addition to a doctorate in economics. How do all of these areas fit together to inform your research?

It took a while for me to figure out what I wanted to pursue as a career. As a high school student in Korea I had to choose a track that focused on either the physical sciences or the humanities/social sciences. At that age, it’s hard to know what you want to be. Simply because my father was an engineer, I chose the physical sciences track. When it was time to apply for college (one actually had to determine a major when applying for college back then), I became interested in international relations and wanted to become a diplomat. But given my training in the hard sciences and the fact that one had to choose a major when applying, I had to decide on a science or engineering major. After browsing through the library a few architecture books caught my eye, and I opted for architectural engineering as my major. 

I truly enjoyed my six years of architectural training but after working for an architectural firm for several years in Seoul, I realized I was more interested in the abstract ideas of architecture and urbanism and less of the actual design process that goes on in an architectural firm. I searched for my next career, became interested in urban and development policy, and pursued a master’s of public policy at Duke University. However, then I realized that economics would allow me to rigorously analyze the policy questions I was interested in. Fortunately, Brown University accepted me as a Ph.D. student and I eventually became an economist. It was through this search process, that I developed an interdisciplinary interest in policy relevant questions. My personal choices constrained by education policy, comparatively experiencing Korea’s transition while living between Korea and the United States each decade since the 1980s, and my interest in architecture and cities have shaped my research interest in economic development and growth with a focus on education, firms and cities.  And now being at FSI, I can immerse myself in international studies, something I had wanted to pursue all along. By joining Stanford, I think I finally discovered what I had wanted to do.

One of your research streams looks at the effects of sanctions on domestic populations, looking at the case study of North Korea. How did you derive data about the closed-off regime? What are your key findings?

Research on North Korea is challenging because of the dearth of data. I had been interested in how sanctions impact the domestic population, but to examine this question one would need regional level data within in North Korea. I decided to use the satellite night-lights data, which in recent years has been used as an alternative means to measure economic activity. I found that sanctions actually increase urban-rural inequality. An additional sanctions index increases the urban-rural luminosity gap by about 1 percent. However, if I focus on the more central urban areas the gap increases to about 2.6 percent. Since urban areas are more than ten times brighter than rural areas, the results imply that the gap further increases by 1 to 2.6 percent with additional sanctions.  Furthermore, I find that the urban areas actually get brighter while the rural areas get darker.

Another of your research focuses on the impact of 1970s education policy in South Korea on intergenerational mobility and migration. Can you explain this phenomenon? Does the case of South Korea relate to reform experiences in other countries?

Students in South Korea traditionally had to take an entrance exam to enter high schools. After the exam, high schools would choose students based on the exam scores. Given the variation in school quality, a hierarchy of high schools had existed and students who performed well would enter the top tier high schools. This system was heavily criticized since wealthier families could tutor children to prepare for the entrance exam. Eventually in the mid-1970s, the South Korean government abolished the exam-based system and moved to a school district based system where students would attend high schools based on residential location. By moving away from an exam system to a district system, policymakers hoped that educational opportunities would alleviate the persistence of inequality. However, what I find is that, to the contrary, the district system generated substantial sorting of households by income. Now wealthier households could simply move to districts and cities with the prestigious high schools. Given that the purchase of housing is purely determined by income, school quality became even more segregated by income and actually exacerbated the persistence of inequality across generations. This transition is now happening in several Chinese cities and in the United States – the sorting across school districts by educational outcome has created highly segregated towns. The Korea experiment allowed me to examine not just an equilibrium outcome, but also the transition when the policy changed.

In the coming year, you’ll be teaching courses related to the economies of East Asia. Can you provide an outlook on this?

I’ll be teaching an International Policy Studies course titled, “Economic Growth, Development, and Challenges of East Asia,” in the spring. The course will focus on China, Japan, and Korea, but also draw on Southeast Asian countries, when relevant. I will cover the rapid economic growth in recent decades and development policies pursued. However, I will also cover the current major economic challenges these countries face, some of which are rising income inequality, entrepreneurship, and an aging workforce. I hope to add to our rich set of courses by providing an economics and empirical viewpoint.

Tell us something we don’t know about you.

I sometimes split my sleep. That is, I go to bed to sleep for a few hours and then wake up in the middle of the dark, do some reading or work, and then sleep for one or two hours before I start my morning routine. It started during my high school years and it has stuck with me for quite a while now. Don’t worry, though. I sleep fine most of the time. I just sometimes enjoy the dead of the night.

The North Korean regime has adjusted to international sanctions by shifting that economic pain away from cities to the countryside, new Stanford research using satellite night lights data shows.

U.S. policy toward North Korea has been based on the expectation that economic sanctions could deter North Korea from developing nuclear weapons or change the behavior of the regime, according to Yong Suk Lee, a Stanford economist at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Since 1950, both the United States and the global community have adopted a series of economic sanctions against North Korea. The latest came in 2013 when the United Nations approved restrictions on banking, travel and trade in response to North Korea's underground nuclear test and threat to launch nuclear strikes against the United States and South Korea.

In a working paper, Lee examined how North Korea's Communist rulers have adapted to the increasingly tougher sanctions through the years.

"North Korea is one of many autocratic regimes that refuse to yield to sanctions, and its isolation and hereditary dictatorship make it a particularly good example to study the impact of economic sanctions in autocratic regimes," said Lee, the SK Center Fellow and a faculty member of the Korea Program at Stanford's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

North Korea is one of the poorest countries in the world, Lee noted. Its leaders follow an economic model based on a centrally planned economy and self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world.

Satellite data

Lee's research was based on nighttime views of lights from data collected by the U.S. Defense Meteorological Satellite Program. The researcher created "average luminosity" measures of lights across North Korea based on a 1-mile-by-1-mile grid for the years 1992 through 2010. Light usage was examined for brightness on one-minute intervals.

To predict the impact of sanctions on economic activity in North Korea, Lee used a formula that transformed the luminosity measures into GDP measures. For example, a 10 percent change in the satellite lights is associated with about a 3 percent change in GDP.

According to Lee, satellite data is of greatest utility in assessing the economies of cities and regions in the developing world. In a country like North Korea, a large part of economic activity happens during the evening and night and involves light. For example, lights at night are generated by peoples' consumption of goods and services as well as transportation. And some production activities happen during the evening hours.

"Economists have found that how bright night lights are can predict national and sub-national GDP quite well, especially in countries where GDP data is not reliable," he said.

Lee found that economic sanctions decreased luminosity in the hinterlands, but increased luminosity in urban areas, especially toward the centers. As for whether additional sanctions affected luminosity, he found they increased the urban-rural luminosity gap by about 1 percent. When he examined the more central urban areas, the gap increased by about 2.6 percent.

"The results suggest that the dictatorship countered the effects of sanctions by reallocating resources to the urban areas," Lee said. One could surmise that the economic sanctions do not affect the country's leadership much, he said.

The hinterlands responded to declining economic fortunes by relying more on trade with China near those border areas, Lee added. In fact, the sanctions generated more North Korean migration to China and reliance on Chinese merchants and goods. North Korea's border with China is relatively porous as opposed to its heavily militarized border with South Korea.

'Increasing inequality'

The upshot, Lee said, is that sanctions that fail to change the behavior of an autocratic regime may eventually increase urban-rural inequality.

"Sanctions will likely be inefficient as long as North Korea can maintain powerful centralized control and oppress any discontent that arises due to increasing inequality," he said.

Lee added that sanctions will most likely not deter North Korea's nuclear weapons activities. They have not done so yet, and at this point, North Korea's leaders view sanctions as inconveniences, but not regime-threatening. Plus, even the harshest sanctions would be unlikely to stem the flow of all goods, energy and money into North Korea. Not all countries would go along with draconian trade restrictions that hurt the poorest people the hardest, he said.

"Even if sanctions were imposed to full capacity, the marginalized population would suffer the most," said Lee, adding that he was actually surprised about his project's findings.

"One can always hypothesize a story but to actually find such effect in the data was quite exciting. Frankly, I pursued this project expecting that I wouldn't find any impact of sanctions on lights," he said.

Clifton Parker is a writer for the Stanford News Service.