ABSTRACT
By the late 1980s, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) faced unprecedented challenges from the continuing rapid economic growth in the Republic of Korea (ROK), the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, and the cumulative effect of its own policies. The DPRK's response to the setbacks of the late 1980s expressed itself in various forms, beginning with a succession of treatises and rescripts from the Kims, couched in increasingly extreme and uncompromising rhetoric, which attacked the notion of economic reform and defended Kimist ideology. Within the economic policy framework, the DPRK was forced to confront dual crises in the late 1980s. The first was the result of a long drawn-out process of economic decline that had first set in during the mid-1960s. In any circumstance, the cumulative effect of economic decline and ideological rigidity would eventually have had serious repercussions, but the economy now encountered the further, major setback of political turmoil and economic collapse of the Soviet Union.
