North Korea's economy: estimated in Seoul, valued in South Korean prices

Who measures an economy that publishes no accounts

North Korea does not publish national accounts, an official price index or regular economic statistics. Britannica notes that reliable information on the economy has usually been lacking and that the production figures the government did release were often inflated. Price data is treated as a state secret. The one recent official total came in 2021, when the government's Voluntary National Review to the United Nations gave a GDP of US$33 billion for 2019 without saying how it was derived.

So the series everyone quotes is compiled in Seoul. The Bank of Korea has estimated North Korea's GDP every year since 1991. It takes production quantities supplied by what the bank calls relevant institutions, values them at South Korea's prices and value-added ratios, and follows the System of National Accounts. The bank's own release warns that the results "should not be directly compared with those of other countries". Its estimates of real growth:

Why the estimate is disputed

The method has critics. An analysis published by 38 North in November 2024 argued that the production approach overstates output because it cannot see unpaid labour drawn from workers and students, and because South Korean prices hide North Korean inflation. The Bank of Korea put the fall in real GDP from 2017 to 2022 at 8.4%; Professor Byung-Yeon Kim of Seoul National University, working from defectors' accounts of household income, put it at 25%. William Brown of the Korea Economic Institute of America has suggested the bank stop publishing the series.

Researchers fill the gap with what Stephan Haggard, Kyoochul Kim and Munseob Lee called forensic economics in a paper of May 2026: satellite images of night lights and crops, the trade records of North Korea's partners, prices smuggled out by phone through networks with China, surveys of refugees and close reading of state media. The night-light estimates show a rise over the last two decades that the Bank of Korea series does not.

How the plans built heavy industry and stalled

Partition left the north with most of the peninsula's industry. In 1945 it held about 80% of Korean heavy industry but 31% of light industry, 37% of agriculture and 18% of commerce. The plans that followed the war gave heavy industry more than 80% of state investment in industry between 1954 and 1976, and industry's share of combined farm and factory output rose from 28% in 1946 to well over 90% by 1980.

The plans also produced the first gap between what the state reported and what could be checked. The government claimed that the second seven-year plan, for 1978 to 1984, had raised industrial output to 120% of its target, an average growth of 12.2% a year. The output of the main commodities over the same years grew by 78% for electricity, 50% for coal and 85% for steel, which does not support the claim. Industrial output began to fall in 1990, the year the Bank of Korea's series opens with a contraction of 4.3%, and after its collapse in 1991 the Soviet Union demanded hard currency for its exports.

The history article covers the famine that followed.

What the economy is made of

The Bank of Korea's breakdown of nominal output for 2024 describes an economy with a farm sector thirteen times the South's share and a government sector more than twice it:

In 2024, by the same estimate, mining grew by 8.8%, manufacturing by 7.0% on the strength of heavy and chemical industry, and construction by 12.3%, mainly in housing, while farming, forestry and fishing shrank by 1.9%. State media reported the completion of a programme of 50,000 flats in the capital with the opening of Saebyol Street in February 2026.

Measured in South Korean won, North Korea's gross national income for 2024 was 44.4 trillion, 1/58 of the South's, and income per head was 1.72 million won, about 3.4% of the South's, on a population the bank put at 25,816,000. Converted to dollars, the totals vary with the converter: Britannica gives a GNI of US$32,720 million and US$1,271 a head for 2023, Human Rights Watch a figure for 2023 of about US$1,200 a head, and the Conversable Economist blog, writing in April 2026, a GDP of about US$26 billion for 2024.

How the planned economy is organised

The constitution says the means of production are owned by the state and by social and cooperative organisations, and Article 33 names the Taean work system, devised in the early 1960s, as the method of managing industry. Economic plans have set priorities since 1954, beginning with reconstruction and heavy industry; agriculture got little attention until the 1970s and consumer goods until the late 1980s. By 1958 every private farm had been absorbed into more than 3,000 cooperatives of about 300 families on about 500 hectares each, which deliver their produce to the state.

Private property is allowed within limits. Article 24 counts as private the produce of "kitchen gardens" and income from "other legal economic activities", and farmers may keep chickens, bees and fruit trees.

How the markets grew and were pushed back

The famine broke the state's hold on distribution. Private trade revived in the 1990s, and in the early 2000s, by one estimate, the average family drew some 80% of its income from small businesses that were technically illegal. Markets were legalised in stages in 2002 and 2010, mostly for food. In 2011 the average official wage was worth about US$2 a month and actual income about US$15, most of it earned outside the state sector and much of it by women. The Korea Institute for National Unification counted 440 government-approved markets employing about 1.1 million people in 2017.

The state has pushed back more than once. In late 2009 it revalued the won at 1% of its old value, closed markets and banned foreign currency, which wiped out savings and brought rare public protests; the official held responsible was executed in March 2010. From 2020 the government halted its reforms, and from 2021 it moved food sales into state-run shops. Human Rights Watch reported in 2025 that private, unofficial trade had almost completely ceased in recent years.

What North Korea digs and makes

Britannica places the great bulk of the peninsula's known mineral deposits in the north, about 200 minerals of economic value among them. Iron ore is mined in the Hwanghae provinces, South Pyongan and South Hamgyong, with lower-grade deposits at Musan; anthracite along the Taedong around Anju; and magnesite around Tanchon. Steel is made at Songnim, Chongjin and Kimchaek, machinery at Kangson near Pyongyang and Huichon, fertiliser and petrochemicals around Anju, and textiles in Pyongyang, Sinuiju and Sunchon.

Electricity is the constraint on all of it. Generation peaked in 1989 at about 30 terawatt hours, 60% of it hydroelectric. The 1990s cut it to a critical level, and power cuts still slowed the processing of the 2008 census returns.

The defence industry is a sector of its own and is estimated at 30 to 60% of the economy. From the summer of 2023 to the end of 2025, arms sales to Russia are estimated to have earned more than US$10 billion, and Bloomberg News estimated in 2026 that North Korea earned US$22 billion in foreign revenue from 2022 to 2025.

What the special zones were for

The state has fenced off small areas for foreign money. A free-trade zone was set up at Rajin-Sonbong, now Rason, in the late 1990s. Mount Kumgang received almost two million South Korean tourists between 1998 and 2008, when a soldier shot a South Korean visitor and the tours stopped. The Kaesong Industrial Complex, run with South Korean companies, closed in February 2016. Britannica describes these zones as run under strict supervision for the sole purpose of collecting foreign currency. Tourism, mainly Chinese, brought in around US$175 million in 2019, the year before the borders closed, and animation studios and the overseas construction firm Mansudae Overseas Projects earn abroad.

What North Korea trades and with whom

The Bank of Korea's trade figures come from the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency and the Korea Customs Office, and count goods only. China is the main partner.

Exports in 2024 rose on hats and wigs, ores and clocks; imports of fertiliser fell by 87.8% and of cereals by 88.1%. In 2016 coal shipments to China made up about 40% of exports.

Trade with South Korea has stopped. Goods crossing the line were worth US$31.3 million in 2018 and nothing in 2023 or 2024, and there has been almost none since the Kaesong Industrial Complex was closed in February 2016. Trade with the South is covered from the other side in South Korea's economy article.

How the UN sanctions work

The Security Council's sanctions began with resolution 1718 in 2006 and were widened by resolutions 2270 and 2321 in 2016, 2356, 2371, 2375 and 2397 in 2017, and 2664 in 2022. A Panel of Experts reported on their evasion until Russia vetoed its renewal on 28 March 2024. Russia argued that the sanctions had become "detached from reality" and burdened the population; China said they had worsened the humanitarian situation; the United States said the veto silenced an independent investigation.

How people are fed

The World Food Programme, which has worked in the country since 1995, cites an estimate from the UN report on food security of 2022 that 10.7 million people, more than 40% of the population, are undernourished, and puts stunting at 18% of children under five. The public distribution system, which about 70% of people rely on, supplies rations below the government's own target.

Access to measure is itself intermittent. Human Rights Watch recorded that an FAO delegation visited in July 2024 for the first time since the pandemic closed the borders, and the agency's crop reports in between rest on remote sensing and weather data. The main harvest of rice and maize makes up about 90% of annual production. For 2026 the UN Food and Agriculture Organization reported generally favourable weather and good vegetation in satellite data in mid-August, ahead of a harvest due to finish at the end of October. Only about 17% of the land is arable. The shortfall has been measured from outside for two decades: in 2004 more than half the population, 57%, did not have enough food to stay healthy and 37% of children were stunted; in 2006 the WFP and FAO put the grain requirement at 5.3 to 6.5 million tonnes against domestic production of 3.825 million; and in 2008 production of 3.34 million tonnes of grain equivalent met a need estimated at 5.98 million.