A Most Enterprising Country: North Korea in the Global Economy

North Korea has survived the end of the Cold War, massive famine, numerous regional crises, punishing sanctions, and international stigma. In A Most Enterprising Country, Justin V. Hastings explores the puzzle of how the most politically isolated state in the world nonetheless sustains itself in large part by international trade and integration into the global economy. The world's last Stalinist state is also one of the most enterprising, as Hastings shows through in-depth examinations of North Korea's import and export efforts, with a particular focus on restaurants, the weapons trade, and drug trafficking. Tracing the development of trade networks inside and outside North Korea through the famine of the 1990s and the onset of sanctions in the mid-2000s, Hastings argues that the North Korean state and North Korean citizens have proved pragmatic and adaptable, exploiting market niches and making creative use of brokers and commercial methods to access the global economy. North Korean trade networks—which include private citizens as well as the Kim family and high-ranking elites—accept high levels of risk and have become experts at operating in the blurred zones between licit and illicit, state and nonstate, and formal and informal trade. This entrepreneurialism has allowed North Korea to survive; but it has also caused problems for foreign firms investing in the country, emboldens the North Korean state in its pursuit of nuclear weapons, and may continue to shape the economy in the future.

About the Author :
Justin V. Hastings is Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Comparative Politics at the University of Sydney. He is the author of No Man's Land: Globalization, Territory, and Clandestine Groups in Southeast Asia, also from Cornell.

Review :
[I]t is refreshing to have a volume examining the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) that does not contain the biased impressions of a journalist, but instead applies the rigorous research and analysis of a scholar. Justin Hastings traces the role of entrepreneurship in the evolution, structure, and operation of North Korean trade networks from the end of the Cold War to the present. Like Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland's valuable analysis of social and economic change in Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea (2011), Hastings delves into a hard-to-reach subject with creative methods and considerable sophistication. He embeds his descriptions and insights in a theoretical framework he derives from Global Value Chain analysis, but instead of adding value to the product itself, each node in an often managerially complicated and logistically circuitous trade network takes a cut of the profit.... This is a terrific book that is well written and makes an important contribution to political-economic scholarship on North Korea. - Shepherd Iverson (Journal of American-East Asian Relations) Policy-makers, scholars, students, and anyone interested in North Korea's future should read this book. It delivers insights and valuable lessons on North Korea's economy and foreign trade. (Pacific Affairs) Justin Hastings, in his terse and densely documented new book, A Most Enterprising Country, brings a new perspective on North Korea's economic adaptations and ambivalent relationship with international law. (European Journal of Korean Studies)