Foreign Policy Research Institute A Nation Must Think Before it Acts North Korea’s Negative Growth in 2017: Things Look Bad, Unsurprisingly, But Take the Numbers With a Grain of Salt

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North Korea’s Negative Growth in 2017: Things Look Bad, Unsurprisingly, But Take the Numbers With a Grain of Salt

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Bank of Korea (BOK) has put out their yearly estimate of North Korea’s GDP trends. This year, they estimate that the country’s GDP decreased by 3.5 percent. Off the top of my head, this seems a fairly reasonable estimate, particularly since sanctions were only in force for a minor part of the year (late fall and onward). Some quick thoughts below:

As always, remember: estimate GDP in North Korea is very, very hard. How do you evaluate, for example, the market sector versus the state sector? Given how complicated and partially opaque North Korea’s system for pricing it, how can a GDP figure even be reasonably estimated? That said, BOK has been doing this for many years, and their figures are, for all their faults and flaws, some of the most reasonable estimates among the few that exist.

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