This lecture will describe North Korea as seen from the inside - its people, their aspirations and fears, and what it is like to live amongst them.

With frequent appearances on BBC discussing North Korea, Mr. Everard, former British Ambassador to North Korea, 2006-2008, brings extensive knowledge of North Korea, China and South America to APARC.  He served as British Ambassador to Uruguay in 2001-2005, and was head of the Political Section in Beijing 2000-2001.  He was responsible for political relations with the troubled states of West Africa and managed mutinational efforts to restore democracy to Bosnia, 1995-1998.  He became the youngest British Ambassador to Belarus in 1993.

During his fellowship at the Asia-Pacific Research Center, Mr. Everard will hold seminars related to his research project on North Korean life and society and will be involved in various projects on Korea.  He is also a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Asia Research Centre of London School of Economics.

Mr. Everard studied French, German and Chinese at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and studied Chinese history and economics at Bejing University. He holds an MA from Manchester Business School.

The Muslims of South Asia made the transition to modern economic life more slowly than the region’s Hindus. In the first half of the twentieth century, they were relatively less likely to use large-scale and long-living economic organizations, and less likely to serve on corporate boards. Providing evidence, this paper also explores the institutional roots of the difference in communal trajectories. Whereas Hindu inheritance practices favored capital accumulation within families and the preservation of family fortunes across generations, the Islamic inheritance system, which the British helped to enforce, tended to fragment family wealth. The family trusts (waqfs) that Muslims used to preserve assets across generations hindered capital pooling among families, and they were ill-suited to profit-seeking business. Whereas Hindus generally pooled capital within durable joint family enterprises, Muslims tended to use ephemeral Islamic partnerships. Hindu family businesses facilitated the transition to modern corporate life by imparting skills useful in large and durable organizations.

Timur Kuran is Professor of Economics and Political Science, and Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University. His research focuses on social change, including the evolution of preferences and institutions. He has just completed a book, The Long Divergence (Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2010), on the role that Islam played in the economic rise of the Middle East and, subsequently, in the institutional stagnation that accompanied the region's slip into a state of underdevelopment. Some of the archival work on which this book was based will be published, also in 2010, as a ten-volume bi-lingual set entitled Kadı Sicilleri. Among Kuran's earlier publications are Private Truths,(Harvard University Press, Işığında 17. Yüzyıl İstanbul'unda Ekonomik Yaşam / Economic Life in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul, as Reflected in Court Registers Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification 1995) and Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism (Princeton University Press, 2004), each translated into several languages, including Turkish.

Link to paper:  http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1656038

Philip Keefer is a Lead Research Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. Since receiving his PhD in Economics from Washington University at St. Louis, he has worked continuously on the interaction of institutions, political economy and economic development. His research has included investigations of the impact of insecure property rights on economic growth; the effect of political credibility on the policy choices of governments; and the sources of political credibility in democracies and autocracies. It has appeared in journals that span economics and political science, ranging from the Quarterly Journal of Economics to the American Review of Political Science, and has been influenced by his work in a wide range of countries, including Bangladesh, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, México, Perú, Pakistan and the Philippines.