North Korea: An Economy of Resilience, in spite of Sanctions

North Korea is probably the least free economy in the world, with state control of practically everything, and thought control to boot. Most North Koreans are miserably poor. North Korea’s problem is not sanctions or atomic bombs - or even the money spent on its military. It’s more basic than that - and it’s the same problem as Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. The ruler is an autocrat. His word was law - Who is going to invest their money in a country where the Ruler could take it just by saying so. Not just the Ruler - any of his senior flunkeys could do the same. That provides a SUBSTANTIAL barrier to investment. If you have money in those situations, you don’t invest it - you hide it. Welcome to The Atlantis Report. The notion of the economy is questionable when it comes to North Korea. The international community does not trade with this country apart from China. As a result, North Korea is heavily dependent on its Chinese neighbor. There are some black markets where imported products from China are sold to the population, but the vast majority of North Koreans are deprived of basic necessities. Due to the embargo, the country has kept very rudimentary agriculture. The machinery is often obsolete, and the production of rice, for example, is very low proportionately to the needs of the population. Another aspect is the hierarchy. The closer one is to the regime, the easier he will find products. Those who are close to the regime live in the capital and, to a certain extent, can enjoy a slightly higher standard of living. However, those who live in the rest of the country lead a life that is similar to the middle age, the life expectancy is pretty low. Also, children in the countryside always look less healthier than those of the capital. There is little tourism in North Korea, and it is extremely controlled, most visitors will not be able to get an accurate picture of the country as the regime only shows a pretty face to its visitors. Finally, we lack some information to have a conclusive view of their so-called economy. Some humanitarian organizations have been able to enter the country, and they all draw the same conclusion: they faced a deplorable situation where people strive to survive, food is rare in the country. In reality, North Korea isn’t a communist country. It isn’t really a socialist one either. It follows a philosophy called Juche instead, which originally had Marxist undertones, but it is basically now an exercise in a totalitarian dynastic monarchy, where the entire country exists to the benefit of one family, the Kims. North Korea has its own political ideology - Juche, as developed by Kim Il Sung, the state’s founder. Juche is the highest stage of socialism, whereby the Korean masses are to act as the "masters of the revolution and construction" and that by becoming self-reliant and strong, a nation can achieve true socialism. The country’s constitution, legal framework, and ideology put the Kims firmly at the top of the pile in absolute luxury, and everybody else is expected to be happy to struggle to survive underneath them. Whereas in Communist thought the workers control the means of production and property and so forth is divided equally to the benefit of all, in North Korea the state controls the means of production and most of the property, meaning that need and privation is the norm for the vast majority. The workers are expected to have no freedom of thought or action, submitting in all these to the Great Leader, i.e., whichever Kim is on the throne at that point. While Communism is effectively impossible to implement in practice, Juche is no less so, for while it supposedly leads to the freedom and self-reliance of the workers, it has in practice enslaved them to a totalitarian King in all but name and made them entirely dependent on the state and, indeed, foreign nations, for the bare necessities essential to survival. North Korea is an almost textbook example of how empty and meaningless ideology is in the face of the realities of greed, selfishness, corruption, the imperfection of man, and the ineptitude of government. North Korea survived the collapse of the soviet union thanks to 2 factors, Juche and China. With the support of China, North Korea has avoided the suffering of other countries. Now come to Juche, Juche is a cult-like ideology that originates by Kim ll Sung to be a political ideology “the independent stance of rejecting dependence on others and of using one’s own powers, believing in one’s own strength and displaying the revolutionary spirit of self-reliance. , but someone in their family tree likes to be a supreme leader and make some small changes to it, now Juche is all about unconditional loyalty to the workers' party and race supremacy. It has been fixed to preserve the Kim family dictatorship. This fascist-like ideology has helped North Korea suppress its own citizens and allow itself to persevere. North Korea is one of the most secretive countries in the world. The economy is quite tricky to measure because of the lack of data. We only have estimates of the size of the economy of the country. In the wake of international sanctions against North Korea, its trade volume with China halved in just one year, prompting the regime to seek hasty solutions. In fact, last year's trade volume between North Korea and China stood at 2.43 billion dollars, not even half the figure of the previous year. January's trade volume also shrank 8.4% compared to a year ago. Such economic hardship is compounded by a chronic food shortage. North Korea produced 4.95 million tons of grain last year, down 500,000 tons from 2017. In an unexpected move last month, North Korea's Permanent Representative to the United Nations Kim Song admitted to the food shortages in his country and asked the international community for help. North Korea's current exports to China fell to one-tenth of what they were before the sanctions. That means the amount of foreign currency going into North Korea shrank as well. It appears that North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-un's request to remove five economic sanctions at the Hanoi Summit was intended to solve these pressing economic issues. North Korea is pushing a five-year economic development plan after giving up its parallel development of nuclear weapons and the economy. But just as its leader Kim Jong-un said that there is no time to waste, the rapidly-deteriorating North Korean economy needs immediate solutions to keep it from spiraling out of control. So how and why is North Korea becoming stronger and stronger with such a bad economy? What are they trying to achieve? Well, the truth is - it's hard to predict what North Korea is really trying to achieve. But I'm pretty sure it has three goals. #1. Food Aid: Use the nuclear weapon as a bargaining chip. North Korea is quite poor, and hence it depends on foreign food aid to survive. America gives a lot of food aid to North Korea, and North Korea can blackmail America to keep donating. Otherwise, they'll bomb South Korea. [North Korea has nothing to lose in case of retaliation] #2. Maintain the regime: The Kim regime that rules North Korea needs to flex muscle and show power in order to survive. Argentina's military dictator invaded the Falkland Islands in 1983 because his government was unpopular at home. This flex of power suddenly gains supporters. Look at what Putin done in Crimea. His economics failed, and Russia went into recession - so he distracts the public by annexing Crimea. A regime needs an enemy to distract people from the problems at home. It's a classic propaganda technique. #3. Avoid Invasion: Stay Independent. The regime seems incorrigible for now, and America/China/South Korea cannot invade North Korea, because oh well, we'll remember the atomic bombings of Seoul. North Korea does have a weak economy - but it still has enough cash to make nuclear bombs because it starves most of the populace. North Korea has uranium deposits, so there's no need to import uranium. The entire Korean peninsula, both North and South, has no known recoverable oil and gas reserves or potential to develop any within their respective territories. So, North Korea will remain dependent upon China and skirting current sanctions to acquire the oil (primarily) required for fuel and energy needs. There are abundant dirty coal reserves which they do exploit and use as an export to China. That source of energy is rapidly being replaced where possible due to the severe pollution it causes major cities in China and North Korean energy production for electricity. If they had oil and gas reserves, they would have already begun to exploit them. There really isn’t any movement in the DPRK government, either politically or economically. Other than very showy pie-in-the-sky projects aimed at the elites and Chinese tourists (who never come), there has been little construction or progress. There are two basic problems that hinder any North Korea development: 1) the country lacks enough arable land to feed itself. Climate change has made the situation worse by adding frequent floods and droughts into the food equation. 2) North Korea lacks infrastructure. There is NO general availability of electricity, clean water, or access to basic public health services outside of Pyongyang. Kim Jong-Un continues to tighten the grip of the Kim Dynasty that was begun by his grandfather. It is a continuously tense and dog-eat-dog political situation where Kim’s subordinates watch his every move for any sign of weakness. Any coup that deposes Kim will result in an even more repressive and brutal government. The sanctions have meant that 95% of the population is in a death spiral with little food, no legitimate ways of earning foreign exchange, and none of the services —- infrastructure, health care, social safety nets, even fire protection —- on which any sort of consumer economy could be built. It is hard to think in terms of tourist hotels on sunny beaches when over 80% of the population has life-threatening parasites and no medical system except traditional Korean medicine. Kim has shown that he is an expert in playing the high-stakes game of brinkmanship played by his father and grandfather. But he has the advantage of a large nuclear arsenal and between one-quarter and one-third of government spending goes to the military. In the last two years along, Kim has converted his A-bomb arsenal into H-bombs and has made an estimated one new warhead a month. He has replaced his Soviet-era SCUDs with new serial production copies of the Russian Iskander-M tactical ballistic missiles. (This is the game-changer that the Trump's White House calls “short-range projectiles.) North Korea has two ballistic missile subs capable of carrying four missiles each in the final phases of construction and has converted a number of existing small subs to Air-Independent Propulsion subs, which can lie on the bottom in ambush for 2 - 3 weeks at a time. Concentration camps are being expanded, and the Chinese are tightening the border with North Korea. So, no. I only see the situation getting worse and worse until there is an apocalyptic collapse. And when the collapse happens, the result will almost certainly not be good for anyone. This was The Atlantis Report. Please Like. Share. And Subscribe. Thank You.












The Financial Armageddon Economic Collapse Blog tracks trends and forecasts , futurists , visionaries , free investigative journalists , researchers , Whistelblowers , truthers and many more