Despite the common perception that North Korea is unknowable due to limited access to information, both books under review are excellent examples of taking full advantage of resources that are available to produce engaging scholarship on contemporary North Korea. Indeed, the two books are able to tap into entirely different sources of information: Stephen Haggard and Marcus Noland rely on quantitative survey data from North Korean refugees while Patrick McEachern makes extensive use of official North Korean media for a qualitative content analysis. I review each in turn before bringing them together at the end.

Rather than a full monograph, Witness to Transformation can best be described as a follow-up report to the authors' previous publication, Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). And like their previous work, this one is also based on an implicit faith in markets to solve not only...

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