In this presentation, Sangyoon Park of the University of Hong Kong provides evidence on the economic costs of the recent United Nations sanctions on North Korea. Exploiting a novel data set on North Korean firms, Park and coauthors construct measures of regional exposure to export and intermediate input sanctions and show that they cause sharp declines in local nighttime luminosity. Additional analysis of newly available product-level price data reveals that import sanctions led to significant increases in market prices. They then estimate a quantitative spatial equilibrium model using cross-region variations. The model implies that the sanctions reduced the country’s manufacturing output by 20%. They also further quantify the potential impact of alternative sanction scenarios.


This webinar is part of the Seoul National University-UC San Diego Joint Webinar Series.

Speakers:
Sangyoon Park, Assistant Professor of Economics, HKU Business School, University of Hong Kong.
Jungmin Lee, Professor of Economics, Seoul National University (Moderator)