Rajin-Seonbong, new gateway of Northeast Asia

Abstract

The economic zone of Rajin-Seonbong (Raseon) is located at the north-eastern border of North Korea, adjacent to China and Russia. Although its attractiveness to foreign investors has remained limited since its creation in 1991, Raseon is of growing interest as a transit port for Russian and Chinese trade. This paper reviews some theories on the constraints and advantages of remotely located ports, arguing that limited economic base can be overcome by a strategy based on transhipment flows to and from China, South Korea, Russia and Japan. In particular, it develops the idea that economic factors, such as remoteness from the nation"s core region, are not sufficient to explain the uneven success of the project. More likely is the mismatch between local industries and port facilities. Unlike the Chinese free-trade zone experiment, port and logistics development in North Korea may take place prior to industrial development, strengthening Raseon as a potential gateway and growth pole in Northeast Asia.

Centrality and vulnerability in liner shipping networks: revisiting the Northeast Asian port hierarchy

“…A majority of such studies has focussed primarily on Chinese ports or China-related containerization [29], while others extend the analysis to Northeast Asia as a whole [30][31][32][33]. Another bunch of research includes studies of port governance, port development and port competition at Chinese [34,35], South Korean ports [36,37], and also Japanese [38], Taiwanese [39], and North Korean ports [40,41].…”

Regions and material flows: investigating the regional branching and industry relatedness of port traffics in a global perspective

“…Another type of study by geographers, more focused on employment, underlined the negative externalities of large seaports upon their host territory in the form of lower wage levels and below-average productivity compared with other regions (Grobar, 2008;Hall, 2009). This was also the case in other regions where ports mainly act as gateways serving inland core economic regions, with lowand even sometimes negativelocal externalities (Jo and Ducruet, 2007), as seen with the decreasing added value of European port regions in the last few decades (Lever, 1995).…”

Hub dependence in constrained economies: the case of North Korea

“…The Mount Geumgang International Tourism-Free Zone has attracted many South Korean tourists. These expanding projects financed by South Korea have much better results than earlier projects, such as the Rajin-Seonbong Free-Trade Zone, the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), and the Sinuiju Special Administrative Region, which have been limited due to politics and mismanagement [22].…”