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Begin New Search Topic Development Author Nicholas Eberstadt

1. Western Aid: The Missing Link for North Korea's Economic Revival?

Author:
Nicholas Eberstadt
Publication Date:
04-2011
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
Abstract:
As the leadership of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (hereafter DPRK, or North Korea) looks to the future, economic development figures centrally in its officially proclaimed agenda. This year, as it has done every year over the past decade, the government's joint New Year editorial stressed the imperative of economic construction, broadly outlining the sorts of improvements that are to be achieved over the remainder of the current calendar year, and intoned that "The present grand onward march for the improvement of the people's standard of living demands that a full-scale offensive be launched in the overall economic front." But economic growth and development has just taken on a whole new importance in North Korean policy, one that extends beyond rhetoric: this past January, for the first time in over two decades, Pyongyang has formally unveiled a new multi-year economic plan: a 10-year "strategy plan for economic development" under a newly formed State General Bureau for Economic Development. The new economic plan is intended not only to meet the DPRK's longstanding objective of becoming a "powerful and prosperous country" [Kangsong Taeguk] by 2012 (the 100th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il Sung), but also to promote North Korea to the ranks of the "advanced countries in 2020."
Topic:
Development, Economics, and Foreign Aid
Political Geography:
Israel, South Korea, and North Korea

2. World Population Prospects and the Global Economic Outlook

Author:
Nicholas Eberstadt
Publication Date:
02-2011
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
Abstract:
This paper examines global demographic prospects to the year 2030 and assesses the influence that impending population trends may have upon economic performance in coming years for the world as a whole and the major regional economies. A reasonably reliable assessment of prospective global trends to 2030 is feasible today because the overwhelming majority of people who will be living in that future world are already here, alive today. This includes all of that future world's senior citizens and almost its entire workforce. Major changes in global population trends are in the offing--among these, a sharp slowdown in the growth of available manpower, with impending declines of manpower for some regions, and pervasive population aging. Furthermore, in many of today's important "emerging markets" demographic pressures may constrain economic growth more significantly than is currently appreciated. Coping with these looming demographic realities will require far-reaching reforms and innovations if we hope to maintain the pre-crisis tempo of global economic growth (much less accelerate it).
Topic:
Demographics, Development, Economics, Emerging Markets, and Poverty

3. The Dying Bear

Author:
Nicholas Eberstadt
Publication Date:
11-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Foreign Affairs
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
December marks the 20th anniversary of the end of the Soviet dictatorship and the beginning of Russia's postcommunist transition. For Russians, the intervening years have been full of elation and promise but also unexpected trouble and disappointment. Perhaps of all the painful developments in Russian society since the Soviet collapse, the most surprising -- and dismaying -- is the country's demographic decline. Over the past two decades, Russia has been caught in the grip of a devastating and highly anomalous peacetime population crisis. The country's population has been shrinking, its mortality levels are nothing short of catastrophic, and its human resources appear to be dangerously eroding. Indeed, the troubles caused by Russia's population trends -- in health, education, family formation, and other spheres -- represent a previously unprecedented phenomenon for an urbanized, literate society not at war. Such demographic problems are far outside the norm for both developed and less developed countries today; what is more, their causes are not entirely understood. There is also little evidence that Russia's political leadership has been able to enact policies that have any long-term hope of correcting this slide. This peacetime population crisis threatens Russia's economic outlook, its ambitions to modernize and develop, and quite possibly its security. In other words, Russia's demographic travails have terrible and outsized implications, both for those inside the country's borders and for those beyond. The humanitarian toll has already been immense, and the continuing economic cost threatens to be huge; no less important, Russia's demographic decline portends ominously for the external behavior of the Kremlin, which will have to confront a far less favorable power balance than it had been banking on.
Topic:
Development
Political Geography:
Russia and Soviet Union