Few topics seem to provoke emotions in the West like North Korea does. The reasons include the perspective that this is one of the last remaining bastions of a system that has been fought ferociously and finally defeated during the Cold War. Eastern Europe has transformed itself completely. The Soviet Union is gone. Even China has changed beyond recognition. But North Korea persists, despite all its obvious systemic deficiencies and a list of problems that would easily go beyond the scope of this review.
The causes of this stubborn refusal to collapse and the question of how long this economy will survive are the core themes of the book. It is a collection of essays, which naturally entails a number of strengths and weaknesses. To start with the former, there is little of a consistent analytical framework applied throughout, there is some overlapping contents, and most of the chapters have...