![]() ![]() While numbers and percentages may provide instant gratification in finding answers to North Korea’s current economic conditions, the fundamental matter at hand is economic policy, for it is this that will have longer-term consequences for the future of the country and possibly even the Korean Peninsula. Articles that seem as though they might provide some insight into the Kim regime’s thinking on economic policy are often long and obscure, taking the art of deciphering state propaganda to new heights. Even the annual budget breakdowns and production growth rates at parliamentary sessions - the only set of official economic statistics provided by the North - are all percentages and not actual amounts, which is hardly helpful to economists seeking hard data on the country’s economic conditions. For a nation that devotes a great deal of its media space to economic news, it reveals surprisingly little useful information about the actual state of the economy. ![]() Notwithstanding the high level of interest in the North Korean economy, it is a murky topic for most followers of the country. That it was already ailing before COVID arrived is something Kim himself has alluded to and admitted on multiple occasions. Pyongyang’s surprising acknowledgment of a COVID-19 outbreak in the country raises many questions, one of which is how the epidemic might impact the economy. The North Korean leader’s appeal to keep up economic production while combating a COVID outbreak - which Kim described as a “ great upheaval,” an unusually strong formulation to refer to a domestic situation in North Korea - shows just how vulnerable the country’s economy is. “Though the epidemic prevention situation is harsh at present … there should be nothing missed in the planned economic work,” Kim Jong Un said last month. ![]()
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