{"id":2240,"date":"2016-03-07T07:00:12","date_gmt":"2016-03-07T14:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/?p=2240"},"modified":"2016-03-06T23:34:46","modified_gmt":"2016-03-07T06:34:46","slug":"north-korea-the-closed-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/2016\/03\/07\/north-korea-the-closed-economy\/","title":{"rendered":"North Korea the Closed Economy (?)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The CIA world fact book reports that North Korea&#8217;s GDP in 2011, 2012, and 2013 was at $40 billion each of those years. The GDP composition is broken down in agriculture (22% of GDP), industry (47%), and services (31%) (2015 est), and only 5.9% of GDP provided by exports. However, the service sector, in which North Korea&#8217;s economy gains a third of it&#8217;s gross domestic product, largely consists of a tourist industry (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/travel\/2015\/oct\/08\/north-korean-tourism-ethics\">ethical implication<\/a>?). CNN can provide you even more information on How North Korea Makes Money.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This is a time machine. This is 1930&#8217;s Russia or this is 1950&#8217;s Soviet Union..So they see me as the Yankee imperialist aggressor, and I see them as the land that time forgot&#8221;, a Vice reporter commented about the stagnant nature of North Korea from the perspective of illegally filming <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=24R8JObNNQ4\">Inside North Korea<\/a> in 2011 .<\/p>\n<p>North Korea&#8217;s economy is <a href=\"http:\/\/funwithbonus.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/surprised-picard-you-dont-say.jpg\">largely run by the government<\/a>, which controls imports, exports, and manufacturing. According to &#8216;North Korea expert&#8217; <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Andrei_Lankov\">Andre Lankov<\/a>, a Russian scholar of Asia and a specialist in Korean studies, the economic policy and direction Kim Jong-un is going seems relatively forward thinking compared to his father&#8217;s era.\u00a0 Lankov explains how the North Korean economy couldn&#8217;t be completely closed considering how it was built upon<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=acIBgwP2rY8\"> illegal black market trade<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The black market activity solves the question as to <a href=\"http:\/\/thediplomat.com\/2015\/07\/the-real-cause-of-north-koreas-drought-problems\/\">how North Korea&#8217;s economy is able to survive<\/a> after both the great famine of the 1990s and a record breaking drought in 2015, just last year. (Blogger&#8217;s note: the causes weren&#8217;t completely natural, but rather due to poor policy).<\/p>\n<p>So it seems that the North Korean government is realizing that being a completely closed economy just won&#8217;t work in 2016. And although North Korea has been open to receiving foreign aid and handouts from international organizations since the 1990&#8217;s the &#8216;government&#8217; has been stubborn to open to greater trade relations<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The CIA world fact book reports that North Korea&#8217;s GDP in 2011, 2012, and 2013 was at $40 billion each of those years. The GDP composition is broken down in agriculture (22% of GDP), industry (47%), and services (31%) (2015 est), and only 5.9% of GDP provided by exports. However, the service sector, in which North Korea&#8217;s economy gains a third of it&#8217;s gross domestic product, largely consists of a tourist industry (ethical implication?). CNN can provide you even more information on How North Korea Makes Money. &#8220;This is a time machine. This is 1930&#8217;s Russia or this is 1950&#8217;s <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/2016\/03\/07\/north-korea-the-closed-economy\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">  North Korea the Closed Economy (?)<\/span><span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":503,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[376,375],"class_list":["post-2240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-closed-economies","tag-korth-korea"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/503"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2240"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2243,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240\/revisions\/2243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}