Transcript
Georgy Toloraya: I think that the next step under the Six-Party process is to suggest to North Korea to sit together and work out some kind of a long-term economic plan and how we are going to modernize their economy. And while I insist that reforms and openness are not the right words, we should speak about modernization and maybe normalization of their economy. The Six-Party mechanism could be a sort of coordinator in this process, so even after the working groups on normalizing bilateral relations with the U.S. and North Korea and Japan are long gone, I think the economic working group should evolve into a body which oversees the economic assistance programs and how they are implemented. They could also be joined by other countries which are interested in North Korea’s economy like the European Union and Australia or Canada or whoever. It should work in coordination with the international financial organizations like the IMF, the World Bank, Asian Development Bank as well as others, and they should be very consistent. The economic aid, the economic assistance, and the investments should be funneled into the areas which help transform the North Korean economic structure and help the country to modernize.
Then we come to the question: Is it possible from the point of view of the economic system? Is the marketization of North Korea possible? It is well underway regardless of what the North Koreans say and write. It is going on and I think that we should promote these kinds of tendencies by encouraging economic experiments, such as the way to a market economy in China: creating isolated experimental farms while working on more or less market principles, arranging the facilities for export production, joint ventures, and free economic zones which already exist. We have remarkable and spectacular progress with that because of the recent Korean summit meeting when North and South Korea actually agreed that the whole triangle adjacent to the military demarcation line would become a sort of hunting ground for South Korean business. But these experiments should not be seen by the North Korean leadership as challenging the core of the economy, the core of their political system and gradually accepted and broadened around the country. Sooner or later these quantitative changes will lead to quality changes.
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