Stephan Haggard on N. Korea's Nascent Free Market Economy
'Tiramisu time' in Pyongyang
03/13/2012
Aubrey Belford,
CNN International
The changes are visible on the streets. Shops that were bare several years ago are stocked with goods, cars jam the roads and restaurants are full -- and multiplying in number. Dull uniformity has given way, in small part, to fashionably dressed women and teens in Chinese threads tentatively aping East Asian pop culture. The hammering of construction sites is constant. More than one million North Koreans are now mobile phone subscribers.
Just why this is happening, no one can fully explain. This is North Korea, after all, where economic data are treated as state secrets. But there are fairly well educated guesses being tossed around.
One thing remains certain -- North Korea as a whole is still desperately poor. The country's economy shrank by 0.5% in 2010, the last year for which figures are available, according to the (southern) Bank of Korea. Agriculture, fishing, forestry and manufacturing all declined. The country has been receiving aid from the World Food Program since April last year; the program is currently aiming at keeping about 3.5 million people from starvation.
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Stephan Haggard is the director of the Korea-Pacific Program at IR/PS, where he specializes in the Korean economy. In 2011 Haggard published Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea with co-author Marcus Noland, with whom he also writes for the Peterson Institute for International Economics blog.
