朝鲜经济为何复苏？

Every 5 years, North Korea holds a workers party congress. At the one before last in 2021, Kim Jong-un was a sorry sight. The economy was a mess. Co was sweeping across the country and things were so bad that Kim was forced to tearfully apologize for his failures. At the most recent one earlier this year, however, the vibes were very different. Kim triumphantly declared that North Korea was in a glorious and more prosperous era promising quote both sweets and bullets with the implication being that North Korea's economy is doing well enough to both provide for its people and fund its nukecentric military program.

So in this video we're going to look at the North Korean economy and why it's apparently doing all right. Trump has launched so many military interventions, it's kind of hard to keep track. So, in the latest issue of our magazine, Too Long, we go instance by instance to work out what Trump's doing across the world and if he's launching a holy war. That's just some of 80 pages in the magazine because there's more in too long than you'd expect.

Purchase your copy by clicking the link in the description. So, let's start with a bit of history. Because while North Korea is today generally perceived as an economic basket case, this wasn't always the case. In fact, in the first decades after the Korean War, the North Korean economy actually outperformed South Korea. This was in part thanks to copious amounts of aid from its communist allies, China and the Soviet Union, which was then channeled into a Soviet style command economy centered around heavy industry.

According to CIA estimates, by 1960, North Korea was on a per capita basis substantially wealthier than its southern neighbor. However, North Korea's growth rates began to slow in the 1960s. This was in part because North Korea's first leader, Kiml Sun, aligned himself with China after the SOS Soviet split, prompting a steep reduction in Soviet aid. But it was also because Kim really doubled down on his policy of duche or self-reliance and minimized trade with the outside world.

Many socialist/communist states pursued similar policies, but none to the same degree as North Korea, which even pulled back from the Sovietled Comic-Con trade block. Somewhat unsurprisingly, this didn't work, and in the 1970s, North Korea started borrowing heavily on international markets in order to import advanced machinery, which it couldn't produce domestically. But exports remained weak and whatever foreign currency North Korea could accumulate was mostly spent on energy imports, especially after the 1973 oil crisis, leading to a series of defaults in the mid 1970s.

The country didn't really have a financial sector, so to speak. So, it didn't experience the sort of financial crisis that sovereign defaults usually engender. But this did mean that North Korea could no longer borrow on international markets, which limited its access to foreign imports and effectively pushed the country back towards utarchy. This is when the gap between North and South Korea really started to open up.

But things then got even worse with the collapse of the Soviet Union around 1990, which put an end to both direct Soviet aid and subsidized Soviet oil. This triggered a severe economic crisis culminating in an appalling famine. Out of a total population of 22 million, somewhere between 300,000 and 3 million people starved to death with millions more suffering from acute malnutrition. The state receded in this period because it literally lacked the resources to monitor and command the economy.

And as the economy began to recover in the 2000s, an informal market-based economy expanded in its place. This was also when the Chinese economy was really taking off, which was good news for North Korea, given China is basically the only country it trades with. North Korea doesn't publish its own GDP figures, but estimates from the South Korean Central Bank, the Bank of Korea, suggest that the North Korean economy posted solid GDP growth throughout the early 2000s.

However, growth rates slowed in the late 2000s, largely due to gradually escalating UN sanctions after North Korea's first nuclear test in 2006. Growth rates then created in the mid2010s in large part because China, which had previously helped water down any UN level sanctions, agreed to substantially stronger sanctions in 2016 and 2017. This meant that the North Korean economy was already in a bit of a state going into the pandemic, which proved utterly ruinous.

Trade with China collapsed, taking the economy with it. Deprived of fertilizer and hit by severe typhoons, domestic crop production plummeted, creating widespread food insecurity. North Korea's public health system was unsurprisingly unable to cope with the wave of infections that swept through the population. It was such a disaster that at the party congress in January 2021, Kim was forced into an utterly unprecedented tearyeyed apology on national television.

However, in the years since, the North Korean economy has seemingly roared back to health with the Bank of Korea estimating more than 3% GDP growth every year since 2023. This is plausibly an underestimate as well. Since the expansion of the informal economy in the 2000s, a gap has opened up between the Bank of Korea's GDP estimates and the growth in nighttime light activity, which economists generally consider to be a pretty good proxy for GDP, suggesting the Bank of Korea might actually be understating North Korea's real growth rates.

Similarly, more recent nighttime light data from Pyongyang specifically suggests that Capital's luminosity has essentially doubled since the pandemic. Kim has also announced the completion of some big ticket infrastructure projects recently, including last month a number of long delayed hydroelectric power plants, which have historically accounted for the majority of North Korea's power output. It's obviously not hard data, but foreigners who visited the capital, Pyongyang, claim that the city is noticeably more developed than it was only a few years ago.

So, what's gone right? Well, we see at least three reasons. First, Russia. North Korea has provided arms, troops, and even construction workers to help Russia during its war against Ukraine, which has proved incredibly lucrative for the regime and provided Kim with a much needed source of foreign currency. Second, China. China is no longer enforcing UN sanctions as stringently as it did in the late 2010s, and trade between the countries has duly boomed, which has helped the North Korean economy benefit from what we might describe as spillover effects from China's ongoing economic growth.

North Korea has also benefited from what Western policy makers describe as China's over capacity, which has allowed it to import Chinese solar panels and electric cars at rock bottom prices. Third, sanctions. Not only are the UN sanctions not being enforced properly, the non-UN sanctions coordinated mostly by the US and its allies have also become less effective over time. This is part of a more general story. As the US has imposed sanctions with increasing frequency, the rest of the world has created more and more workarounds to insulate themselves, hence their waning efficacy.

Now, of course, it's important not to overstate this. North Korea still has in dollar terms a GDP per capita in the low thousands. It's also worth noting that while Pyongyang might look all right to tourists, the rest of the country is a lot poorer. Nonetheless, as the change in tone between the two most recent party congresses made clear, it's at least true that the economy is doing a lot better than it was. And this is probably bad news for anyone who doesn't want an emboldened North Korea.

When a story like this breaks, the headlines aren't just fast, they're fragmented. Depending on where you get your news, you might be seeing a completely different version of the same event. So, how are you supposed to know who and what t

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