Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Reform From Below: Behavioral And Institutional Change In North Korea, Marcus Noland, Stephan Haggard

Marcus Noland

The state is often conceptualized as playing an enabling role in a country’s economic development—providing public goods, such as the legal protection of property rights, while the political economy of reform is conceived in terms of bargaining over policy among elites or special interest groups. We document a case that turns this perspective on its head: efficiency-enhancing institutional and behavioral changes arising not out of a conscious, top-down program of reform, but rather as unintended (and in some respects, unwanted) by-products of state failure. Responses from a survey of North Korean refugees demonstrate that the North Korean economy marketized in …