on top of being a stalinist dictatorship, it’s in complete autarky.
that’s probably why North Korea is worse than damn near everywhere on earth, including other communist/stalinist dictatorships.

Second, some recipes really are bad, so bad that they have never been tried in the developed countries. Complete autarky, as implemented in North Korea, is an obvious example.

Sound money yes, (as long as it means the absence of hyperinflation rather than “inflation nutterism”). But fiscal solvency seems very controversial indeed to me. I’d only sign up for a non-explosive path for the primary deficit as being a sensible minimum condition. “Fiscal solvency” implies to me that governments shouldn’t default on their debt, and in lots of cases I think they should.

When do propriety rights stop being secure and become unferrered ?

But that’s a point that’s of mainly historical interest. The big issue is property rights, and here DD is right on the money. What matters is secure property rights under the rule of law, not unfettered private property rights.

doesn’t this mean that we can already reject any development theories or policies which do not entail progress towards those (neo?) liberal things?

Well, these principles have often been implemented via policy arrangements that are quite unconventional.
I guess that’s a complicated issue.
Land reforms, for instance are often viewed as attacks on propriety rights but it has been a way to establish markets and propriety rights in the past. However that would not mean that land reforms automatically have those results.

there ought to be a clue from the fact that China is a success story that “minimal adherence” is doing a lot of work here. “Property rights” doesn’t even necessarily mean “individual property rights”.

Consider this a pre-emptive strawman burning.

“In particular, first-order economic principles,- protection of property rights, contract enforcement, market-based competition, appropriate incentives, sound money, debt sustainability- do not map into unique policy prescriptions.”

“The Martian would recognize that the growth record is consistent with some of the “higher-order” economic principles that inspire the standard policy consensus. A semblance of property rights, sound money, fiscal solvency, market-oriented incentives- these are elements common to all successful gropwth strategies. Where they have been lacking, economic performance has been lackluster at best.”

“First, China relied on highly unusual, nonstandard institutions. Second, these unorthodox institutions worked precisely because they produced orthodox results, namely market- orientated incentives, property rights, macroeconomic stability , and so on.”

“In fact, principles such as appropriate incentives, property rights, sound money and fiscal solvency all come institution-free.”

“No country has experienced rapid growth without minimal adherence to what I have termed higher-order principles of sound economic governance-property rights, market-oriented incentives, sound money, fiscal solvency. But as I have already argued, these principles have often been implemented via policy arrangements that are quite unconventional.”

That argument being that for the goal, development, to be reached it is a necessary condition that we have those standard (neo-?) liberal things, markets, sound money, property rights etc, but that there are many ways of reaching them. Obviously I’ll find out more when I read the rest of the book, but doesn’t this mean that we can already reject any development theories or policies which do not entail progress towards those (neo?) liberal things?