North Korea: Market opportunity, poverty and the provinces

Abstract

The article explains the process of marketisation without liberalisation that has been taking place in the DPRK since the famine of the 1990s. it identifies unexpected outcomes in the high rates of malnutrition found in agriculturally productive provinces and explains these as the product of political controls and extraction of agricultural surpluses by the government. It also explains the lower than expected malnutrition rates in agriculturally less productive provinces as the product of 'bottom-up' exploitation of market opportunities.