Do North Koreans Actually Make Money?
Less than 30 years ago, North Koreans were more than twice as wealthy as their comrades in China. Now, they're significantly poorer. Here's how it happened.
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After the end of the Korean war, North Korea was a virtually cashless society - everyone worked for the state and was provided for by the state. And in the Communist bloc context of the day, it worked - in 1989 North Koreans were more than twice as wealthy as their comrades in China. Now we think of them as a hermit kingdom and not trading very much. William Brown spent his career analyzing North Korea for the CIA. But actually they were integrated reasonably well into the Soviet plan system of countries. The loss of support from the Soviet Union, after its collapse in 1991, and a series of droughts and floods lead to a great famine in North Korea. The famine pretty much ended the public distribution system in which the North Korean state fed everybody through the ration system… the governm...
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After the end of the Korean war, North Korea was a virtually cashless society - everyone worked for the state and was provided for by the state. And in the Communist bloc context of the day, it worked - in 1989 North Koreans were more than twice as wealthy as their comrades in China. Now we think of them as a hermit kingdom and not trading very much. William Brown spent his career analyzing North Korea for the CIA. But actually they were integrated reasonably well into the Soviet plan system of countries. The loss of support from the Soviet Union, after its collapse in 1991, and a series of droughts and floods lead to a great famine in North Korea. The famine pretty much ended the public distribution system in which the North Korean state fed everybody through the ration system… the governm...
