Investigating the cooperative strategies between China and North Korea for the Tumen River Area Development Programme

S Lee ,W Park ,Heekyung Park

doi:10.4314/wsa.v37i2.65872

Abstract

Addressing the equitable management of an international boundary river, this study aims to find the optimal strategy with regard to how to build multi-purpose dams and allocate the benefits and costs thereof. The interests of the riparian countries (North Korea and China) are defined in terms of the cooperative 2-person nonzero-sum game, and the Nash product is thencalculated for various alternative strategies. The results reveal that the Kangkudong Dam and the Simpo Dam should be collaboratively constructed, and that the benefits of the 2 dams should be allocated according to relative demand in order to provide North Korea and China with sufficient benefits and to equitably address their conflicting interests. Furthermore, thesuggested strategy was found to be optimal or at least quasi-optimal when the North Korean economy, which is regarded as a crucial source of uncertainty in this case, moved from a low-growth scenario to a high-growth scenario.

Highlights

IntroductionThe river originates from a basaltic plateau, which surrounds Baekdu Mountain, with an altitude of 2 750 m, and flows into the East Sea. The abundant water, which averages 6.8 billion m3/yr, has huge potential as a water resource as well as an electricity source for the riparian countries
It was found that individual net benefits vary across the strategies: under the conditions of the low-growth scenario (LGS) for North Korea, 0.1≤u11≤13.6 and −4.7≤u21≤14.0; under the conditions of the high-growth scenario (HGS), 0.2≤u12≤13.7 and −1.0≤u21≤14.0
The benefit to North Korea is less than 1% of the benefit to China: i.e. u11/u21

Summary

Introduction

The river originates from a basaltic plateau, which surrounds Baekdu Mountain, with an altitude of 2 750 m, and flows into the East Sea. The abundant water, which averages 6.8 billion m3/yr, has huge potential as a water resource as well as an electricity source for the riparian countries. The Kanggudong Dam and the Simpo Dam were estimated to enable a water supply of 845 million and 940 millionm3/yr, and electricity supply of 350 and 275 GWh/yr, respectively

Objectives

Results

Discussion

Conclusion