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Reforms Turns Disastorous for North Koreans
Six months after North Korea announced unprecedented wage and price increases to jump-start its miserable economy, runaway inflation is emptying millions of pocketbooks and bottlenecks in production are causing widespread shortages, according to Chinese and North and South Korean sources.The black market price of rice, the staple of the Korean diet, has jumped more than 50 percent over the past three months in most parts of the country while tripling in others, according to North Koreans, Chinese businessmen and Western aid agency workers. Some factories in poorer parts of the country, such as the heavily industrialized east coast, have stopped paying workers the higher salaries that were a cornerstone of the reforms, recent North Korean arrivals to China said. Others have taken to paying workers with coupons that can be exchanged for goods, they said, but there are no goods in the stores to buy. Have you ever noticed that no matter how repressive of a police state you have, there's still a black market? Of course, it probably means the police are running the black market. "Their new economic policy has failed," said Oh Seung Yul, an economist at the government-funded Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul. "The hopes that were raised in July are today pretty much dashed." The apparent failure of North Korea's attempt to promote economic activity and improve living standards constitutes an important backdrop for its recent threats to resume a nuclear weapons program, according to the sources. On one hand, Oh and others said, North Korea's isolated government needed a scapegoat. On the other, according to Chinese sources close to the secretive government of Kim Jong Il, Pyongyang has determined that it risks economic collapse without security guarantees and access to international lending institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, to which the United States holds the keys. So Kim manufactured a crisis to win concessions, they said. The whole article is worth a read. NK is in big trouble. Posted by: Patrick Phillips 2003-01-27 |
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