North Korea’s economic institutions make it almost impossible for people to own property; the state owns everything, including nearly all land and capital. Agriculture is organized via collective farms. People work for the ruling Korean Workers’ Party, not themselves, which destroys their incentive to succeed.
North Korea could be much wealthier. In 1998, a U.N. mission found that many of the country’s tractors, trucks, and other farm machinery were simply unused or not maintained. Beginning in the 1980s, farmers were allowed to have their own small plots of land and sell what they grew. But even this hasn’t created much incentive, given the country’s endemic lack of property rights. In 2009, the government introduced a revalued currency and allowed people to convert only 100,000 to 150,000 won of the old currency into the new one (equivalent to about $35 to $40 at the black-market exchange rate). People who had worked and saved up stocks of the old currency found it to be worthless.
Not only has North Korea failed to grow economically — while South Korea has grown rapidly — but its people have literally failed to flourish. Trapped in this debilitating cycle, North Koreans are not only much poorer than South Koreans but also as much as 3 inches shorter on average than the neighbors from whom they have been cut off for the last six decades.
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2. Uzbekistan: Forced labor
Coercion is a surefire way to fail. Yet, until recently, at least in the scope of human history, most economies were based on the coercion of workers — think slavery, serfdom, and other forms of forced labor. In fact, the list of strategies for getting people to do what they don’t want to do is as long as the list of societies that relied on them. Forced labor is also responsible for the lack of innovation and technological progress in most of these societies, ranging from ancient Rome to the U.S. South.
Modern Uzbekistan is a perfect example of what that tragic past looked like. Cotton is among Uzbekistan’s biggest exports. In September, as the cotton bolls ripen, the schools empty of children, who are forced to pick the crop. Instead of educators, teachers become labor recruiters. Children are given daily quotas from between 20 to 60 kilograms, depending on their age. The main beneficiaries of this system are President Islam Karimov and his cronies, who control the production and sale of the cotton. The losers are not only the 2.7 million children coerced to work under harsh conditions in the cotton fields instead of going to school, but also Uzbek society at large, which has failed to break out of poverty. Its per capita income today is not far from its low level when the Soviet Union collapsed — except for the income of Karimov’s family, which, with its dominance of domestic oil and gas exploration, is doing quite well.
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3. South Africa: A tilted playing field
In 1904 in South Africa, the mining industry created a caste system for jobs. From then on, only Europeans could be blacksmiths, brickmakers, boilermakers — basically any skilled job or profession. This “color bar,” as South Africans called it, was extended to the entire economy in 1926 and lasted until the 1980s, robbing black South Africans of any opportunity to use their skills and talents. They were condemned to work as unskilled laborers in the mines and in agriculture — and at very low wages, too, making it extremely profitable for the elite who owned the mines and farms. Unsurprisingly, South Africa under apartheid failed to improve the living standards of 80 percent of its population for almost a century. For 15 years before the collapse of apartheid, the South African economy contracted. Since 1994 and the advent of a democratic state, it has grown consistently.
