By Paul Eckert, Asia Correspondent

WASHINGTON, March 23 (Reuters) - The diplomatic deal that promises to bring North Korea aid in exchange for scrapping its nuclear weapon programs might allow the government to resist meaningful economic changes, an expert on the secretive communist country's economy said on Friday.

Marcus Noland of the Peterson Institute, a Washington economic think tank, said research for his new book on North Korea's deadly 1990s famine showed Pyongyang was "at best, ambivalent" about changing policies that led to that disaster.

"The great hope is that reassurances in terms of external security will give the North Korean regime the political room to engage in greater political and economic liberalization at home," the economist told Reuters in an interview.

But the diplomacy playing out in Beijing could have the opposite effect, said Noland, co-author of "Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid and Reform" with Stephen Haggard of the University of California, San Diego.

"It could well be that a nuclear deal that resulted in greater amounts of aid would actually allow the North Korean government to intensify activities that are essentially reestablishing economic and political control over the population," he said.

Negotiators from North and South Korea, China, the United States, Japan and Russia were in Beijing this week, seeking to begin implementing a Feb. 13 deal that would give the North aid and security assurances in return for shutting down a nuclear reactor and preparing other disarmament steps.

Noland's 368-page study of the famine that killed an estimated 1 million North Koreans in the late 1990s shows how the rigid central planners of Pyongyang were forced to allow markets to feed people and to give farmers some limited freedoms, but then pulled back when the disaster eased.

"When things look better ... the North Korean government tries to pull back on this process of marketization and reform," Noland said.

"One of the saddest things is that as food aid began arriving in North Korea, the regime systematically cut the amount of food it bought on commercial terms," he said.

The author of three books on North Korea decries what he says are "truly reckless" food policies since the end of the famine. Pyongyang has banned trading in grain on markets that people rely upon for food, confiscated grain in rural areas and reneged on policy promises to farmers, he said.

"In a variety of ways, it seems to want to put the genie back in the bottle," he said.

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