Working Paper S e r i e s
WP 07- 7

AUGUST 2007

North Korea’s External Economic Relations
Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland
Abstract
North Korea’s international transactions have grown since the 1990s famine period. Illicit transactions appear toaccount for a declining share of trade. Direct investment is rising, but the county remains significantly dependent
on aid to finance imports. Interdependence with South Korea and China is rising, but the nature of integration
with these two partners is very different: China’s interaction with North Korea appears to be increasingly onmarket-oriented terms, while South Korea’s involvement has a growing noncommercial or aid component. These
patterns have implications for North Korea’s development, the effectiveness of UN sanctions, and its bargaining
behavior in nuclear negotiations.

JEL codes: F5, P3, F14
Keywords: North Korea, sanctions, political economy, aid, transitional economies
Stephan Haggard is the Lawrence and Sallye Krause Professor at the University of California, San Diego Graduate
School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. He is the author of The Political Economy of the Asian
Financial Crisis (2000) and coauthor of The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (1995) and Famine in North
Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform (Columbia University Press, 2007). He is a member of the Advisory Committeeof the Institute. Marcus Noland, senior fellow, has been associated with the Institute since 1985. He was a senioreconomist at the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President of the United States andhas held research or teaching positions at Yale University, the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Southern
California, Tokyo University, Saitama University (now the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies), theUniversity of Ghana, the Korea Development Institute, and the East-West Center. Noland is the author of
Korea after Kim Jong-il (2004) and Avoiding the Apocalypse: The Future of the Two Koreas (2000), which won the
2000–2001 Ohira Masayoshi Award, and coauthor of Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform (Columbia
University Press, 2007).
Authors’ note: Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Samsung Economic Research Institute’s 20th
Anniversary Seminar, “North Korea after the Nuclear Test,” Seoul, December 13, 2006, and the conference on“Interdependent Koreas,” Hiroshima Peace Institute, Hiroshima, December 18–19, 2006. The research was
supported by a generous grant from the Smith Richardson Foundation; our thanks to Allan Song for facilitating
this grant. We would also like to thank Chi Chong and Erik Weeks for research assistance.
Copyright © 2007 by the Peterson Institute for International Economics. All rights reserved. No part of this working paper
may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission from the Institute.

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During the 1972 US presidential campaign, “Deepthroat,” later revealed to be FBI Associate
Director Mark Felt, counseled Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to “follow
the money” to unravel the Watergate scandal. This working paper represents a similarly inspired forensic
exercise. It seeks to make two contributions to our understanding of North Korea’s external economic
relations by “following the money.”First considerable uncertainty surrounds the state of the North Korean economy and thecountry’s external sector in particular. Analysts have remarkably little access to conventional economic
data, and much of the reported trade and investment data are fragmentary, improperly conceptualized,
and subject to gross measurement error (Noland 2001, Eberstadt 2007). Simply establishing a factual
baseline of the country’s external sector, as well pinpointing the sources and magnitudes of uncertainty
surrounding these estimates, is a sine qua non for coherent analysis.
Second we are interested in understanding North Korea’s external economic relations not simply
in their own right, but for the light they shed on the country’s diplomacy. Much of the debate about
how to deal with North Korea centers on the purported gains from economic “engagement.” Yet in
the absence of a clear understanding of the changing nature of the country’s trade, aid, and investment,
it is difficult to judge whether these ties will have salutary consequences or only prolong the country’s
dependence on international largesse.
The core of this working paper is an effort to construct an internally consistent balance of
payments for the country, considering licit and illicit merchandise trade, services, current transfers, andcapital flows and paying careful attention to the degree of uncertainty surrounding each category oftransactions. This exercise is of particular interest because of the relative magnitude that unconventional
activities play in North Korea’s external relations, particularly weapons exports, drug trafficking, andcounterfeiting. A variety of estimates of these activities exist, many well-informed, but these numbers
are typically offered in isolation without consideration of their plausibility in light of the overall balanceof payments picture. The balance of payments framework offers an approach to assess the plausibility ofvarious public estimates of North Korea’s illicit activities; allows us to identify trends in North Korea’s
external relations and its external financing needs; and provides a convenient indicator of whether the
precision of our knowledge about these transactions appears to be rising or falling.
The working paper also provides information on the geographic distribution of North Korea’s
trade, aid, and investment relations. These changing patterns, including most notably the rising shareof China in North Korea’s trade and the substantial role played by South Korean aid, have important
political implications.

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CONSTRUCTING A BALANCE OF PAYMENTS

Constructing a balance of payments for North Korea is a speculative exercise. Even merchandise trade isregarded as a state secret and must be constructed on the basis of “mirror statistics” reported by partnercountries (Noland 2000, chapter 3). Nonetheless, the balance of payments framework, which embodies
the accounting identity that every sale is also a purchase, helps assess the likely veracity of a variety ofclaims about North Korea’s economic activities including particularly the magnitude of its illicit ones.
We adopt the conventions embodied in the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Balance ofPayments Manual (fifth edition, 1993). Transactions are divided between those entering in the current
account and the capital account. The former encompasses trade in goods and services, income flows,
and current transfers (which includes aid and worker remittances). The latter consists largely of financial
flows including direct and portfolio investment and changes in official reserves. According to doubleentry accounting conventions, imbalances in the current and capital accounts should precisely offset; theyshould sum to zero. This result is generally not the case in practice, however, and a final category, thestatistical discrepancy (called “errors and omissions” in some contexts) is defined as the residual.
As a roadmap to the discussion that follows, major items in the balance of payments include:
Current Account•Goods and Services
▪

Goods

▪

Services (includes transportation, travel, and tourism)•

Investment income•

Current transfers (includes most aid and workers’ remittances)

Capital Account•

Capital transfers (includes migrants’ and other unrequited transfers)•

Financial account (includes direct and portfolio investment)•

Changes in official reserves (includes monetary gold)

Statistical discrepancy
We extend this format to include illicit activities such as counterfeiting which do not appear inconventional balance of payments accounting. We will also make a number of calculations which attempt
to separate out transactions occurring on a commercial basis from politically determined transactions,such as aid, to gain insight into the relative magnitudes of these two modalities of exchange.

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CURRENT ACCOUNT TRANSACTIONS
Observed Goods Trade

North Korean trade volumes began falling in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union andcollapse of the Eastern Bloc which had been North Korea’s primary trade partners (figure 1). (Sources
and methods of constructing these and subsequent estimates are reported in the appendix.) But trade
continued to decline thereafter, reaching a minimum at the end of the famine period 1998–99 at lessthan 40 percent of 1990 values.1 From 2000, it began to revive, though as of 2005, both imports andexports remain below their 1990 values. Since the onset of the nuclear crisis in 2002 exports havecontinued to increase, but imports have grown even more, implying a widening merchandise trade deficit.
Weapons Trade and Illicit Activities

In addition to the trade derived from mirror statistics reported in figure 1, North Korea derives additional
revenues from unobserved transactions, which include arms sales that are not technically illegal as well asclearly illicit activities such as drug trafficking and counterfeiting. It may appear obvious that arms sales
and illicit activities are nonrecorded activities and should be added to the balance of payments as exports,
thus reducing the financing gap. But it is also possible that illicit trade is misreported in other commodity
categories and therefore does not represent a dollar-for-dollar addition to North Korea’s net exports.
Missiles, for example, could be misreported as fabricated metal products in the importer’s statistics.
Public discussion of revenues from these controversial sources has a greater tendency to overstate theircontribution (by assuming that they are entirely additional) than understate it (by excessively correcting
for the likelihood that they are partly captured elsewhere in the trade data). We return to the issue of“additionality” when reconstructing the overall balance of payments.
Arms

In the 1980s North Korea emerged as a significant player in the global arms market, supplying
conventional arms based on Soviet designs including short-range ballistic missiles.2 According to the 1997
Arms Control and Disarmament Agency report, sales in the second half of the 1980s (1986–90) averaged
over $500 million a year (in constant 1996 dollars), just less than 20 percent of total exports for that
period. North Korea’s customers included virtually every major oil exporter, and it sold weapons to bothsides during the Iran-Iraq conflict.
1. The timing of this trough corresponds to the Asian financial crisis and a slowdown in Japan, but domestic factors

were more significant.

2. In addition to weapons, the North Koreans export a variety of military-related training, consulting, andpraetorian guard services (Noland 2000, chapter 3).

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Arms sales fell in the first half of the 1990s, a victim of shrinking demand and increasinglycompetitive supply conditions.3 Nonetheless, there is ample evidence that the North Koreans sought
to revive the business in the mid-1990s (for example, Grimmett 2006). The onset of the nuclear crisis
in 2002 and the missile and nuclear tests of 2006 brought this trade under much closer international
scrutiny, however. A number of customers, including Pakistan, Yemen, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates,
and most recently Libya, subsequently discontinued purchases from North Korea. Since 2003, several
high profile interdictions, the initiation of the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), and diplomaticefforts by the United States to restrict overflight by aircraft suspected of carrying North Korean weapons
have further restricted such sales (Sanger 2005). The most likely ongoing customer of large-scale weaponssystems such as missiles is Iran (which is also one of several countries in the Middle East that does notreport its trade with North Korea to the UN) although Syria is also a probable customer.4
The two sources that venture estimates of total arms sales over time, the US State Department
World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers (2003) and the Stockholm International Peace ResearchInstitute (SIPRI), show steadily declining sales over time (table A.4). The Congressional Research Service(CRS) provides an estimate of $1 billion in total conventional arms sales for 1998–2001, or an average of$250 million a year for that period, enough to place North Korea as the 10th largest conventional arms
exporter for that period (Grimmett 2006). Although these figures are dated and vary substantially, theysuggest that the upper end estimates that are sometimes reported—such as the statement by a US official
that North Korea earned $560 million from missile sales in 2001—are probably exaggerated (Ward 2002,
Lintner 2005). Similarly, although the CRS does not provide an estimate for the more recent reporting
period, North Korea falls off the list of top exporters. The research institutions tracking such sales in
the open-source literature, such as the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies,5 the Wisconsin Project on
Nuclear Arms Control,6 and the Nuclear Threat Initiative7 refer to only a limited number of transactions
3. In the late 1980s, North Korean models began to obsolesce as the Soviets began restricting the transfer oftechnology and designs. Missile exports were also probably affected by the more general shortage of inputs that
followed the collapse of Soviet trade. Following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc Eastern European suppliers steppedup their export activities, generating a glut on the world market for conventional arms. A marked reduction intensions in a number of regions also limited sales; the end of the Iran-Iraq war was almost certainly consequential inthis regard.
4. Between 2000 and 2004 the United States placed sanctions on North Korea no less than five separate times forviolating the Iran Nonproliferation Act (Wisconsin Arms Control Project 2005). Most recently in December 2005 a
German press source, citing German intelligence, identified a purchase of 18 disassembled missiles.
5. See the various studies at the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies’ website, http://cns.miis.edu/research/korea/

index.htm#msl.

6. See the overview of the North Korean missile program at the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control’s

website, http://www.wisconsinproject.org/countries/nkorea/north-korea-miles.html.

7. See the overview of the North Korean missile program at the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s website, http://www.nti.

org/e_research/profiles/NK/Missile/index.html.

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in the 2000s. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports to Congress suggest ongoing sales, but in pro
forma language that is constant across annual reports and without substantiating detail.8 Except for the
possibility of a resurgence of business with Iran and Syria in the early 2000s, sales of major weaponssystems have almost certainly declined.
The declining sales of major weapons systems are no doubt partly offset by provisions of technicalassistance packages, the follow-on sale of parts and fuel, and diversification into other military sales,such as patrol boats and ammunition.9 However, the decline in the sale of large-scale systems would be
followed, albeit with a lag, by a decline in the value of associated sales and services as well.10 Moreover,trade in dual-use technologies that might have any connection with either weapons of mass destruction(WMD) or missile manufacture has come under much tighter scrutiny over the last decade. Suchtransactions are now formally subject to sanction under UN Security Council Resolutions 1695 and 1718
which followed the missile tests of July 2006 and the nuclear test of October 2006 respectively. Althoughsignificant at one point in time, it is likely that the importance of weapons sales as a source of foreignexchange has declined. The lackluster performance of these products in recent tests presumably has nothelped.
Two caveats to this conclusion stem from strategic and demand side considerations. First
although a number of North Korea’s customers have been peeled away, the interest of a small number ofstates in acquiring weapons has no doubt grown; Iran and Syria head this list. Second due to the increased
price of oil in recent years some of North Korea’s historic customers are flush with cash; Iran, again, falls
quite clearly in this category, as does Syria, and by extension, their proxy Hezbollah.11 As we will see inconsidering the geographic distribution of North Korea’s trade, economic ties with the Middle East have

8. “Throughout the second half of 2003, North Korea continued to export significant ballistic missile-related

equipment, components, materials, and technical expertise to the Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa.
Pyongyang attached high priority to the development and sale of ballistic missiles, equipment, and related
technology. Exports of ballistic missiles and related technology were one of the North’s major sources of hardcurrency, which supported ongoing missile development and production.” Available at the Central Intelligence
Agency’s website, https://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/721_reports/july_dec2003.htm#14.
9. Lintner (2005, chapter 11) has detailed transactions of this sort as well as the role of North Korean companies

acting as intermediaries in the purchase and sale of dual-use technologies to a number of Middle Eastern countries.
10. An example of this phenomenon was the April 2007 revelation of a January 2007 deal to resupply Ethiopia

with parts for its Soviet-era equipment. The Ethiopian case suggests that despite the PSI, the United States canturn a blind eye to North Korean arms sales when it has a strategic reason to do so. But the Ethiopian case was the
exception, not the rule (Gordon and Mazzetti 2007, Lee 2007).
11. The Sudan would be another potential customer combining oil revenues with a need for conventional arms.

There have also been reports of arms sales to some African countries that would be plausible given North Korea’s
historical ties to some of these regimes, and the increasing production of oil in Africa that would provide thefinancial wherewithal for such purchases.

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grown substantially. Nevertheless, from an overall balance of payments perspective, we suspect the role ofarms sales in overall exports to have declined from their high point in the 1980s.
Drugs

North Korea has long been involved in drug trafficking, initially exporting opiates and later synthetics
such as methamphetamines. These activities involved both North Korean diplomats as well as cooperation
with international criminal organizations (Noland 2000; Perl 2007; Chesnut 2007).12 Sales of drugs,
which depend on complex wholesale and retail networks, are even more difficult to track than those of
missiles which involve large, discrete transactions. Because these networks involve extraordinary mark-ups
as one moves down the distribution chain, estimates of the drug trade are easily inflated by applying street
prices to upstream transactions.13 The difficulty of constructing revenue estimates is further compoundedby the fact that the North Koreans are not only involved in the production of drugs, but provide courier
services for other producers.14
A former US government official has put annual drug revenues at $100–200 million (Asher
2006). In successive reports for the CRS, Perl (2007) has offered a more modest estimate of $71 million
a year (broken down into $59 million from opiates and $12 million from amphetamines).15 Some simple
calculations of estimated acreage under cultivation, likely output, and wholesale prices lead us to believethat this estimate should be treated as an upper bound.16
12. Although drugs almost certainly dominate North Korea’s smuggling activity, there is evidence—in the formof diplomatic expulsions—for trade in other sanctioned items, including so-called “conflict” diamonds from civil
war zones in Africa, rhino horns, and ivory (Noland 2000; Asher 2006; Prahar 2006). North Korea has also beenaccused of committing insurance fraud as well (Nanto and Perl 2007).
13. For example, in the same congressional testimony, a US official reported both the purchase of 60 kilos ofamphetamines by Japanese crime syndicates for $1 million (or $17,000 a kilo) in 1998 and a Japanese seizure of 565
kilograms in 1999 with a street value of $347 million (or $615,000 a kilo) (Prahar 2006)! Clearly, the former rather
than the latter are closer to what we would consider export prices.
14. This business was brought to light in dramatic fashion in 2003 with the seizure of a North Korean freighter, thePong Su, off the Australian coast carrying 125 kilos of heroin, probably of Southeast Asian origin.

15. As with missiles estimates, the drug trade's value has sometimes veered into the fanciful, including the estimate

from an American military official in 2003 that the North Koreans were earning between $500 million and $1
billion a year from trade in narcotics at a time when total exports for the whole country were only $775 million(Solomon and Dean 2003).
16. According to Perl (2005, 9), the State Department’s 2000 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report

estimated the area under opium cultivation in North Korea at 4,200 to 7,000 hectares in 1998, which would
yield 30 to 44 metric tons of opium, or 4.6 to 6.8 metric tons of heroin at a conversion rate of 6.5 to 1. In 2004,
according to the 2005 World Drug Report (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2005, 46), the farmgate
price of opium ranged from a low of $142 a kilo (in Afghanistan) to $234 a kilo (in Myanmar). If we take thegenerous estimate of $200 a kilo, this would yield a total farmgate value for opium production of only $6–9 million.
On the other hand, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2003, 247) reports wholesale prices of heroin
in China for 2001 at approximately $20,000 a kilo, which would yield a total value of approximately $92–135

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Moreover, these numbers have probably fallen in the 2000s. The most systematic overview ofpublic reports of drug seizures through 2006 shows a dramatic increase in seizures beginning in the mid1990s, but a downward trend thereafter (Chesnut 2007). This source reports a few incidents in recent
years, while the 2005 US State Department International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR)
reports only two small courier incidents for 2004 and notes that no large Japanese seizures had occurred
during the reporting period. Interestingly the 2005 World Drug Report makes no mention whatsoever ofNorth Korea in its detailed discussion of the international heroin and opium markets.
The decline in seizures could reflect adoption of alternative means for bringing drugs into
major export markets including China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea. These means include small
boat deliveries, the use of Chinese triads, Russian Mafia, and Korean gangs as intermediaries and themisidentification of North Korean contraband as originating in the intermediating third country(Asher 2006, Nanto and Perl 2007). However, the decline in seizures could also reflect more effective
surveillance and interdiction of North Korea’s activities.17 We believe the $70 million figure offered by
the CRS should be treated as an upper bound estimate, with one-quarter to half of that estimate as a moreprobable figure for 2005–06.18
Counterfeiting

A second major form of illicit activity is counterfeiting. US government officials had long suspected
North Korea to be the origin of the so-called “supernotes,” very high-quality counterfeits of $100 bills,
which began to appear in 1989.19 However, the issue gained more attention in 2005 with a series of
million, assuming the North Koreans were able to get this wholesale price on all output. Yet prices of heroin onother markets have undergone a sharp decline—as much as 50 percent in wholesale prices—following the overthrowof the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the resurgence of production in that country.
17. In 2006 Japanese police successfully broke up the ring that was responsible for seven, high-profile seizures inthat country in the late-1990s and early 2000s. In 2004 the Chinese Ministry of Public Security publicly statedits concern with North Korean drug smuggling and has also recently prosecuted a number of North Korean
traffickers, albeit small-scale ones. These drug-related actions are in addition to the more general scrutiny towhich North Korean trade is now subject since the onset of the crisis, and of the missile and nuclear tests inparticular. According to Raphael Perl, there was no evidence during the second half of 2006 “of any seizures of
either illicit narcotics or counterfeit currency” produced or circulated by the Democratic People’s Republic ofKorea, a development he ascribes to heightened international sensitivity (Yonhap. 2006. “No Trace of New N.
Korean Counterfeits in Six Months: U.S. Researcher.” Available at http://english.yna.co.kr/Engnews/20061103/
910000000020061103114847E3.html [November 3]).
18. Moreover both official and unofficial reports out of North Korea suggest that the regime itself has begun to show

signs of concern over drug trafficking, either because of external pressure on the issue or more likely because of thepenetration of drugs into domestic use (International Narcotics Control Board 2005, 68).
19. Due to macroeconomic instability and the declining value of the North Korean won, the North Korean

government may also print counterfeits to capture seignorage internally, and some of these notes may simply leakout through North Korea’s cash-based external transactions.
8criminal cases and Treasury enforcement actions against a Macau bank, Banco Delta Asia (BDA).20
Concern over the laundering of counterfeit notes was also behind the Treasury Department
finding that BDA was a financial institution of “primary money laundering concern,” an action thatwas to play a central role in the breakdown of the Six Party Talks in late 2005 and their ultimate revivalin early 2007. Although the official action was a “guidance” issued by the Department of Treasury’s
Financial Crimes Enforcement Network that contained no specific allegations, subsequent Treasury
statements accused the bank of introducing counterfeit notes as well as large-scale money laundering andmanaging the financial transactions of firms engaged in WMD-related activities (Meyer and Demick
2005, Hall 2007).21
As with other illicit activities, estimating returns from counterfeiting is difficult. In the second
half of the 1990s—before the recent emphasis placed on North Korea’s illicit activities—South Korea
estimated total counterfeiting revenues at $15 million, but US officials believed this number was too high(Noland 2000, 121). Since that time, US government officials have estimated that $50 million of notes
have been seized since 1990 and that the total amount of counterfeiting is very much larger than that,even in the hundreds of millions of dollars (Hall 2007). According to Asher (2006) North Korea may
earn as much as 40 percent of the face value of all notes counterfeited. If one simply allocated the $50
million in seizures over the 16-year period, applied the 60 percent discount, and assumed that a dollar
was seized for every one successfully passed it would imply revenues of $1.25 million per year. Seizures
are only some fraction of the total stock of notes in circulation, and this estimate would constitute a lower
bound for currency counterfeiting revenues.
There are reasons to believe that income from counterfeiting is in retreat, however, and indeed
may have been exaggerated from the start. The Treasury Department has stuck closely to its claims about
BDA, and even finalized its initial ruling against the bank in March 2007. But the underlying evidence
has been held secret. Although an Ernst and Young audit conducted for the Macau monetary authorities
indicates that internal controls were weak, numerous press reports claim that counterfeiting throughBDA was overstated and that the motive for targeting the bank was to restrict North Korea’s gold sales
or simply to generate a political bargaining chip. Fearing ensnarement in future money laundering cases,
major banks have since shunned North Korea, impeding its ability to conduct even legitimate commercial
20. As with drug smuggling, the sale of supernotes involves a complex distribution chain in which notes are soldwholesale to distributors at some discount to their face value. A 2005 US indictment documented the alleged
distribution of $28 million in notes in six European countries, while two US sting operations generated indictments
involving $6 million in counterfeit currency (Meyer and Demick 2005; Perl 2006; Chesnut 2007).
21. Although it denied wrongdoing, the bank experienced a run on deposits. Under pressure not only fromthe United States but from correspondent banks in Japan, Korea, and Europe, it severed connections withapproximately 50 North Korean individuals or businesses—many believed to be military-related or party-related—
and allowed Macau authorities to administer its operations.

9transactions. According to Chesnut (2007) currency counterfeiting incidents dropped to zero in 2006.22
Counterfeiting has not been limited to currency, however; evidence also exists of North Korean
involvement in counterfeiting of cigarettes and pharmaceuticals (Asher 2006, Chesnut 2007).23 The US
tobacco industry puts potential gross revenues from counterfeiting on the order of $520–720 million
annually based on the prices of counterfeit cigarettes in Asian ports (Coalition of Tobacco Companies,
2005). However, this estimate is for the value of the cigarettes once they have been sold to criminal gangs
and successfully been smuggled out of North Korea through China; these prices are the equivalent of
the street or retail prices for drugs and do not reflect export prices. One close observer of this trade puts
the actual revenues to the North Koreans much lower: between $80–160 million a year with a central
estimate of perhaps $100 million. Raphael Perl, who indicates that drug sales are declining, believes thatcigarette counterfeiting is actually increasing.24 This trend is notable because illicit activities are sometimes
connected; cigarette counterfeiting helps to keep smuggling in and out of North Korea viable, and thesame boats that move cigarettes allegedly have also moved supernotes and drugs.
As this review shows, there is extraordinarily high variation in the valuation of North Korea’s
illicit sales. In considering estimates of totals, however, it is important to be cautious. Many estimates
make reference to prior periods, or peak levels of the given activity and few make any adjustments at all
for whether foreign exchange earnings from the activity are truly additional to the balance of payments
or hidden in other exports. Moreover, past estimates do not consider the likely effect of closer scrutinyof North Korea’s economic activity that has occurred since the onset of the crisis in October 2002 andparticularly since the US Treasury’s actions of 2005 and the introduction of formal sanctions in the wakeof the missile and nuclear tests of 2006.
Services Transactions

Little data exist on licit services transactions. For example, North Korea has earned a small amount offoreign exchange by permitting commercial airliners overflight rights to its airspace, and there have been
22. In 2006 bilateral meetings with the United States, the North Korean delegation indicated they were prepared tosubscribe to international norms with respect to money laundering, proposed the establishment of a joint US–North
Korean task force on counterfeiting, and even asked the United States to provide technical assistance in identifying
counterfeit bills (Kwak 2006, 15). Resolution of the BDA case was a major North Korean demand in talks held in
Berlin prior to the Six Party Talks in February 2007, and United States’ willingness to discuss the issue through aseparate channel was a key development.
23. The cigarette counterfeiting appears organized in cooperation with Chinese gangs which relocated to North

Korea after their government cracked down on counterfeiting in the context of China’s World Trade Organization
accession and pressure from trade partners including the United States.
24. Yonhap. 2006. “No Trace of New N. Korean Counterfeits in Six Months: U.S. Researcher.” Available at http://

english.yna.co.kr/Engnews/20061103/910000000020061103114847E3.html (November 3).

10

discussions of North Korea generating revenue through railroad tariffs if lines connect South Korea with
Russia and China in the future. North Korean construction enterprises have been increasingly active
internationally in recent years. But today the bulk of services revenues are likely to be derived from theMount Kumgang tourism project (see the appendix for further details). Apart from this channel there
is little reason to believe that services transactions have a significant impact on the overall balance of
payments.
Today North Korea receives $72 million annually in rent for Kumgang, plus an additional fee
per visitor that has been running between $9 and $14 million a year. These admissions fees have fallen
recently as the destination has lost its luster; North Korean belligerency has soured potential tourists.
North Korea also benefits from hotel stays and additional spending by visitors on sundry items. The
South Korean government reports “noncommercial transfers” associated with the project as running in
the tens of millions of dollars annually.
Current Transfers
Private Transfers: Workers’ Remittances

Workers’ remittances are transfers made by workers temporarily abroad (the equivalent transfers bypermanent migrants appear in the capital account). In the case of North Korea workers’ remittances havebeen generated in the Soviet Union/Russia, though in recent years North Korea has been replicating themodel of organizing contract workers in a much wider array of countries, including Libya, Saudi Arabia,
Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic. For example, the supply of North Korean labor for work in the Middle
East was a provision of Orascom Construction’s 2007 investment in a North Korean cement plant(Griggs and Fidler 2007).25 A distinct form of unrequited transfer originates from the Korean community
in Japan and will be discussed in the context of the capital account.
North Korea’s export of labor to Russia dates to the Soviet era, when prisoners were used in
logging compounds that were run entirely by North Korean security forces. In 1995 the North Korean
and Russian governments renewed the treaty that had lapsed in 1993 under which North Korea would
supply 15,000–20,000 loggers to work off Soviet-era debts. A variety of other North Korean enterprises
have subsequently entered the business of providing contract labor in logging and the construction sector
in Vladivostok, employing an additional 10,000–15,000 North Koreans (Zabrovskaya 2006).26
25. Due to human rights concerns over the treatment of North Korean contract workers, the Czech Republic

stopped issuing visas for this purpose in 2007.

26. The impact of these workers on North Korea’s balance of payments is not straightforward. State-owned

companies appear to select workers for three-year contracts, collect and retain all wage payments and pass on
only some share—perhaps as little as 10 percent—to the workers themselves. Alternatively contracts may require

11Zabrovskaya (2006) provides figures on the locational and occupational distribution of
North Korean workers in Russia, estimates of their earnings, and repatriated savings. Constructing
an annual estimate of these remittances is difficult because most of these jobs (for example logging,construction, and fishing) involve seasonal work. Annualizing her monthly data would yield an estimateof approximately $10 million in remittances. Applying this figure to a roughly equal number of workers
thought to be working under official contracts in Russia and elsewhere yields the high end estimate of $20
million. Cutting the best guess estimate in half to account for the seasonal nature of most of this work,and the likelihood that these workers are not employed during the Russian winter yields the lower boundestimate of $5 million.
There is also a community of North Korean refugees in China that has been estimated as
ranging from as few as 20,000 to as many as 400,000 people (Chang, Haggard, and Noland 2006). A
considerable share of these refugees reports returning to North Korea bearing food and money. However,many people in this community are not employed and those who are generally earn low wages. The
amounts that they are transferring back to North Korea are small and may well be declining as increased
policing has discouraged cross-border movement. However there is an ethnic Korean population on
the Chinese side of the border that makes private transfers to North Korea and is a conduit for money
originating in Korean communities outside China. This nonrefugee channel is almost surely more
important in financial terms than funds emanating from the refugees themselves.
Official Transfers
Aid

Since the famine of the 1990s North Korea has received nearly $2.5 billion in aid from official andprivate sources, the overwhelming majority of which has taken the form of in-kind transfers of foodand other humanitarian items (table A.3). Despite claims that humanitarian aid should not be linked topolitics, aid has become much more erratic since the onset of the nuclear crisis with bilateral assistancefrom China and South Korea playing a more prominent role. Assessing the magnitude of Chinese support
is difficult: It does not participate in multilateral initiatives such as the World Food Program, is not amember of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Development
the contracted worker to earn a certain amount per month, allowing them to keep the remainder; this pattern isvisible in the construction sector in Vladivostok. In some cases payments to workers appear to be in-kind or incoupons rather than in cash. Other reports suggest that the contract labor is part of complex barter arrangements
in which labor is used to pay for timber or oil; in this case the wage payments would constitute the counterpart of acommercial import. Yet in all of these cases, remittances constitute a potential windfall to the government becauseof its ability to capture the difference between what firms—effectively the government—are paid and the share ofthat payment actually reaching the workers.

12

Assistance Committee, and does not publish figures on its bilateral aid programs. Chinese customs
statistics do categorize some transactions as “aid,” but these would appear to constitute a lower bound:
The figures appear to exclude major transactions in food and fuel carried out at “friendship prices” which
embody a grant or concessional element although of unknown magnitude.
It is sometimes argued that China simply allows North Korea to accumulate arrears on its tradeaccount. If this is indeed the case, then Chinese support has been significant: Since the mid-1980s the
cumulative trade imbalance has been roughly $7 billion, which could be viewed as the upper boundestimate of support (Haggard and Noland 2007, chapter 6). However it is highly doubtful that the entire
bilateral deficit represents aid. First there is ample anecdotal evidence that the imbalance is financed inpart by other financial flows from China such as foreign direct investment (FDI) and remittances carriedthrough the growing border trade. Second the bilateral deficit could be financed by net export earnings
from trade with third countries or financial flows from those countries, including South Korea which has
a deficit on its current account with North Korea. Taking these considerations into account, we take thehigh-end estimate of Chinese aid as the total value of its exports of food and fuel to North Korea.
Other Official Transfers

In addition to humanitarian and development assistance, North Korea has also been the recipient ofvarious official transfers, including payments by the United States associated with efforts to recover theremains of soldiers missing in action from the Korean War, and more significantly, activities falling under
the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO).27 KEDO’s remit was to construct two
nuclear reactors to replace the nuclear facilities shut down under the 1994 Agreed Framework. KEDO
also had the responsibility to supply oil to compensate for the loss of electricity generation capacity fromthe operating reactor closed under the agreement until the new reactors came on line. Heavy fuel oil
shipments were stopped in December 2002 following the onset of the nuclear crisis. Reactor construction
slowed to a halt in 2003–04, and KEDO itself was formally terminated in 2005.
According to the 2004 KEDO annual report, the organization spent nearly $400 million on
oil between 1995 and 2002 when deliveries were halted. The KEDO annual reports do not permit us toestimate a precise transfer value of local construction on the reactor project. However, the South Korean
government, which had primary responsibility for overseeing construction, reports “noncommercial
27. More than $4 billion was pledged to this effort, principally by the governments of South Korea and Japan.

However, the lion’s share of KEDO funds were both raised and spent outside of North Korea, for example for thedesign and procurement of reactor components. From a balance of payments perspective, we are interested solely inwhat was actually transferred to North Korea. This would appear to consist only of the heavy fuel oil and whateverfunds were used for site construction, including payment for workers and shipped construction materials such as
cement.

13

exports” associated with the project, including construction-related materials. These exports peak at nearly$59 million in 2002. North Korean workers reputedly received $110 in monthly wages; $1 million in
annual wages would appear to be a generous estimate of what the North Koreans were receiving. If we
add $1 million in wages to the noncommercial exports associated with the project, it probably provides areasonably accurate estimate of what North Korea received through this channel.
North-South “Cooperation Projects”

A final, and significant, source of current transfers to North Korea is from the South. These transactions
are dominated by direct support, which has mostly taken the form of food aid and provision of fertilizer(table A.2). Although this support is officially financed by “loans,” there can be little doubt thatthey are in fact aid. However, the aid relationship also encompasses a number of large, highly visible
and symbolically significant North-South “cooperation projects” that occupy a grey area between
commercial and noncommercial transactions. These projects have been closely tied to broader foreign
policy initiatives; as a result, public-private risk-sharing and outright subsidies were features of themfrom the beginning. In connection with agreements reached in 1998 and the North-South summit of2000, Hyundai had promised, and probably made, payments to North Korea of approximately $800
million through 2005; this history is briefly recounted in the appendix. 28 Over time, however, the public
component of these projects has actually increased either because of the financial burden they imposed on
the private actors (mainly Hyundai Asan) or because the political risks seemed too substantial for firms—
and smaller firms in particular—to invest on their own.
In addition to these highly visible large-scale projects, a large number of South Korean
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are involved in North Korean–related projects such as“cultural tourism” and “knowledge partnership” projects have arisen through them. Anecdotally thesereconciliation projects are often alleged to have a significant transfer component. Park and Jung (2007)
document 91 “knowledge partnership” projects over the period 1997–2006. The numbers spike in2001 and 2004, but have since declined as a result of tensions over the North Korean nuclear program(Park and Jung 2007, figure 1). It is quite possible that progress toward denuclearization could resultin another surge of such initiatives. It is unclear how much money flows into North Korea as a resultof these endeavors, and some nominally private or NGO activity is in fact funded by the government.
Nonetheless, NGO activity is not negligible.
28. These projects have their origin in largely private, commercial initiatives particularly from Hyundai. In addition

to the 1998 agreement on Kumgang, Hyundai’s inside track on large-scale investment in North Korea wascemented in the immediate wake of the 2000 summit by an agreement that granted it 30-year exclusive rights toseven other major business areas: railroads; telecommunications; electric power; construction of the Tongcheon
airfield; use of Mount Kumgang reservoir water; development of other tourist sites (including Mount Paekdu); andfor the construction of the Imjin River Dam.
14

Lastly, in July 2007 the governments of North and South Korea announced an agreement underwhich South Korea would supply inputs such as textiles to North Korea’s light industry in return forSouth Korean firms being granted concessions to the development North Korean mines.29 Such deals
resemble barter: In principle they should increase both exports and imports by an equivalent amountleaving the net balance unchanged. In reality, give the opacity of pricing and the scope for politicization,these arrangements may become another channel for implicit South Korean aid.

CAPITAL ACCOUNT TRANSACTIONSNorth Korea has been effectively excluded from international capital markets since defaulting on bankloans in the late 1970s. Its ability to borrow internationally is limited to a relatively low volume ofshort-term trade credits that the OECD put at $188 million in 1994. As described in the appendix, theNorth Korean government received a large and highly controversial one-off transfer from South Korea
in connection with the summit meeting. It also receives significant, though declining, unrequited privatetransfers in the form of migrants’ remittances, primarily from ethnic Koreans in Japan. Inflows of FDI,
mostly from China but from other sources as well, have almost certainly become a more importantcomponent of the overall balance of payments picture. However, there is no consistent data on suchflows and indeed the North Korean government appears intent on hiding their extent for fear that theenterprises might be targeted by sanctions.
Capital Transfers: Private Unrequited Transfers

As with other sources of financial support for the country, the magnitude of private unrequited transfers
has been the subject of substantial controversy. Estimates dating from the early 1990s of remittances fromJapan alone ranged from $10 million a year to a high of $2 billion (Eberstadt 1996; Lind 1997; Noland
2000). The most credible estimates from this period were in the range of $16–41 million and certainly
less than $100 million a year. Since then, a string of events has combined to reduce Japanese remittances,and quite dramatically by 2004–06. As a result of failures of financial institutions associated with the
Chochongryun, the organization of Pyongyang-affiliated Korean residents, and closer scrutiny of theorganization’s support for the North Korean regime, remittances had to be routed through third parties,
such as banks that were targeted by the United States after 2005, or on cash carried by travelers that was

29. United Press International. 2007.“S. Korea to Develop Mines in North.” Available at http://www.upi.com/

International_Intelligence/Briefing/2007/07/27/s_korea_to_develop_mines_in_north/5096/ (July 27).

15

subject to a ¥1 million limit.30 Under pressure from the Diet, the Ministry of Finance began to provide
information based on registered remittances in the form of cash carried or transported by Japanese
residents to North Korea. These reports recorded $29.5 million for fiscal 2002 (ending in March 2002);$22.8 million for fiscal 2003; $23.1 million for fiscal 2004; $24.4 million for 2005. According to otherreports, these need to be supplemented by a small share of funds that are still remitted through banktransfers, which account for approximately 10 percent of the total.31 In addition, there is no doubt somecurrency smuggling. But the wherewithal for the Chochongryun to engage in large-scale transfer is muchdiminished by the failure of linked financial institutions and closer scrutiny of all economic exchanges
with North Korea.32 Moreover, remittances from Japan have since fallen further still; for fiscal 2006,
ending in March, the Ministry of Finance reported a paltry $4 million.
Investment: FDI

We have seen no credible evidence that North Korea has been able to reestablish its ties to international
financial markets. However, there is evidence that the regime has made efforts to attract FDI, and thatit has had at least some success in doing so. The increase in FDI reflects in part policy changes taken
in response to the growing external constraints we have highlighted in the previous sections, in part anadaptive response on the part of enterprises.
We have only one international series on FDI, provided by United Nations Conference on
Trade and Development’s (UNCTAD) annual World Development Report; those figures are reported intable A.5. Apart from a brief spike in the data associated with the push to expand the Rajin-Sonbong
zone (Noland and Flake 1997), they show that investment was low or negative for much of the period,
as frustrated Chochongryun and Russian investors withdrew. Investment turned up sharply in 2003,
however, led by investors from South Korea and China. South Korean investment includes, but is notconfined to, the Kaesong Industrial Complex. Chinese investments are more varied ranging from smallscale informal investments up to large projects in sectors such as mining that involve major state-owned
30. A number of Chochongryun-associated financial institutions were closed or consolidated following several

scandals during Japan’s 1998 banking crisis. The dominant financial channel for remittances, the Ashikaga Ginko,
canceled its correspondent relations with the Foreign Trade Bank of North Korea in 2002 and failed in thefollowing year.
31. The government estimated total remittances at ¥3.04 billion, or $28 million, for the fiscal year ending March

2005 (Nikkei Weekly, September 25, 2006).

32. One channel for carrying cash is the Mangyongbong-92, a ferry that typically made 20–30 trips a year between

Wonsan and Niigata. But in December 2004 these visits were interrupted for over five months by a new Japanese
law requiring pollution insurance, and the ship made only about 14 port calls in 2005. In the first half of 2006, it
docked only three times in Japan before it was banned altogether. Other shipping was also subject to much closer
scrutiny as well, and trade fell to the lowest level since 1988.

16

enterprises. The onset of the second nuclear crisis did not deter such investment, at least through 2005;
the 2002–05 period saw the most sustained inflows into the country since 1990.

THE MODALITIES OF NORTH KOREA’S EXTERNAL ECONOMIC TRANSACTIONSNorth Korea’s current account credits and debits are shown in figure 2. In addition to our baseline or“best guess” estimates, figure 2 also displays high and low estimates formed by applying the extreme
estimates in the reviewed literature. The band defined by the extreme estimates for credits is much larger
than for debits: There is considerable uncertainty about the magnitude of a number of the underlying
credit components including the “additionality” of weapons sales, illicit activities, Chinese aid, andworkers’ remittances. Although North Korea may conceal some weapons-related imports, the scopefor illicit debits appears less. The time patterns of these aggregates largely track those of the reported
merchandise trade figures in figure 1: Current account credits bottom out in the mid-1990s and thenbegin rising first as aid begins to ramp up, and then with the growth of merchandise exports at the endof the decade. By 2005 the baseline magnitudes of both current account credits and debits exceed theirvalues for 1990.
The balance of payments framework can be used to depict the shifting importance of differingmodalities of exchange. Figure 3 displays estimated revenues derived from the export of weapons, drugs,
and counterfeiting activities as a share of North Korea’s licit exports of goods and services, using thebaseline estimate as the denominator. Figure 3 suggests that in recent years arms and illicit exports havebeen a gradually declining component of North Korean export revenue, standing at roughly 14 percent
in 2005, though this statement is characterized by considerable and growing uncertainty. The baseline
begins to diverge more sharply from the high-end estimates in later years because of the increasing
constraints on these activities. If true, however, the high-end estimates indicate that nonconventional
exports are closer to 35 percent of revenues derived from licit goods and services.
Figure 4 documents the growing importance of official transfers during the famine period of the
1990s, with the baseline estimate reaching a peak value of more than half of imports, followed by decline.
However, it is noteworthy that despite the nuclear crisis, official transfers have risen again, equaling morethan 40 percent of the country’s imports in 2005.
According to the baseline estimate, North Korea ran a current account deficit over the entire
sample period (figure 5). However, the divergence of the high and low estimates is such that in only fiveof the 16 years of the sample is the sign of the balance unambiguous. Two of those observations were theterminal years of the sample: In both 1990 and 2005 the country ran a current account deficit, in bothcases probably on the order of $500 million. Keeping in mind that our confidence in the import data17

is more substantial, the “high” estimate of the current account implies that North Korea ran a current
account surplus and exported capital, possibly including reserve accumulation, during the worst of thefamine and its immediate aftermath. This implausible result in fact suggests an important finding. Either
the upper bound estimates of various nonconventional revenue streams are unlikely to be true, at least
jointly, or there are major expenditure items that are missing.
In theory the current account and capital account should sum to zero; any imbalance intransactions in goods and services is exactly offset by a corresponding financial flow (figure 6). In the
North Korean case at times this discrepancy has been large (1990 at the onset of its financial crisis and in
1997 at the peak of the famine) and has taken both positive and negative values, the former implying thatthe country was consuming more resources than can be accounted for by the estimated transactions, i.e.,the magnitude of its current account deficit exceeds capital inflows. So for example in 1990 at the onsetof its economic crisis when the baseline estimate of the statistical discrepancy reaches nearly $400 million,
it is possible that North Korea was financing its imports through a reduction in official reserves which wecannot observe and hence cannot properly record in its capital account transactions. For the period 1990–
2005 the absolute value of the discrepancy over licit merchandise exports averaged 14 percent, reachinga minimum of 1.3 percent in 1993, and taking the value 2.2 percent in the terminal year of 2005. As
points of comparison, the equivalent figures for South Korea, China, Japan, and the United States range
from 1.0 percent (South Korea) to 2.2 percent (China).
In most years the baseline estimate of the statistical discrepancy takes a negative value, implyingthat North Korea has unaccounted for resources. Assuming that these estimates are correct, there are avariety of possible explanations, none mutually exclusive. The first explanation is that even our skepticalguesses about unconventional revenues may be generous, and the earnings generated by these activities
are even less than our best guesses. A second explanation would be that imports are undercounted. It is
possible that North Korea is importing weapons systems that go unreported, or that other items—for
example luxury goods—are not accounted for in existing statistics. A third possibility is that theauthorities have been accumulating official reserves. Although this is difficult to believe for the famine
period, it is certainly possible that the regime saw the resumption of trade and investment in the early
2000s as an opportunity to rebuild foreign exchange holdings.
There could also be unaccounted for capital outflows. We have assumed that North Korea is
not engaged in any substantial FDI of its own, but there is certainly some, such as the establishment oftrading companies engaged in labor contracting or North Korean–themed restaurants. More significantly,
it is possible that at least the top circles of the North Korean elite have accumulated foreign assets.
Some high-ranking North Korean officials maintain residences in foreign countries and educate theirchildren abroad. The possibility of the proverbial Swiss bank account cannot be ruled out, although the18

controversy over a mere $24 million in BDA suggests that such overseas investments are not likely toclose the statistical discrepancy.

SHIFTING PATTERNS OF ENGAGEMENT

The analysis thus far has addressed aggregate trade and financial flows. A distinct issue of political as wellas economic interest is the geographical distribution of these flows. Table 1 reports North Korea’s partnercomposition of trade, excluding aid and noncommercial trade.33 The justification for doing so has to do inpart with the purported logic of engagement: Increasing commercial ties will reinforce economic reforms.
Among North Korea’s three main Asian trading partners, China’s role has increased, South Korea’s
stagnated, and Japan’s role has fallen.34
To get a more refined sense of the shifting role that South Korea and China are playing inNorth Korea’s external economic relations, all economic interactions with the two countries—trade, aid,
and investment—are expressed as a function of licit merchandise exports in figure 7. These aggregates
represent a way of characterizing the density of North Korea’s interaction with its principal partners andof the possible “socializing effects” associated with engagement with the two countries, as well as their
possible political influence. (The figures do not reflect net revenue flows.)
North Korea’s interaction with both countries has risen considerably over the sample period.
The increase in this measure is most dramatic for South Korea rising from zero in 1990 to a peak of
1.3 in 2000, driven in part by the one-off summit payment. After falling from this temporary peak, theseries has converged back to its long-run upward trajectory. The indicator for China rises fairly steadily
throughout the sample period, from 0.4 in 1990 to 1.3 in 2005, slightly exceeding that of South Korea
in this terminal year of our sample period. This combined, gross measure of economic interaction helps
33. In the case of China, the most expansive definition of aid was used (downwardly biasing the Chinese figures).

Trade with Middle Eastern countries reported in the IMF Direction of Trade Statistics and the UN COMTRADE
database but not reported in the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency data, are included.
34. Imports from Russia have also risen steadily over the period, although exports to Russia have not. One

explanation for this trend is North Korea’s clearing system or the absence of one. Given the collapse of North
Korea’s internal payments system in the 1990s, the increasing scrutiny of North Korea’s external financialtransactions, and the aftermath of the BDA case, trade that is not conducted in dollars is probably balanced
bilaterally. Imports are financed either through merchandise exports to the country in question or other earnings
in that currency. In the case of Russia, North Korea purchased Russian imports with ruble-denominated earnings
from contract labor (Zabrovskaya 2006). Similarly North Korea may have cut imports from Japan in part because
restrictions on exports and remittances have limited its access to yen. Even before the missile and nuclear tests of2006, Japan had drifted toward a de facto sanctions policy as well and both trade and remittances had fallen sharply(Hughes 2006); these trends became even more pronounced in the second half of 2006 as Japan opted for a nearcomplete embargo following the onset of the nuclear crisis and in response to ongoing conflicts over abductees.

19

explain South Korean concerns about China’s “economic colonization” of the northern part of thepeninsula.
The picture changes, however, if transactions on commercial terms, and those embodying a
concessional or grant element are disaggregated. What is striking is the difference between the deepening
integration between North and South Korea depicted in figure 7, and the relative stagnation of South
Korea’s role in commercial trade (table 1). This point is reinforced in figure 8: The magnitude of Chinesetransfers, while uncertain, appears to be fairly constant, and since 1999 are dwarfed by South Korea’s
skyrocketing transfers. The ironic message is that North Korea’s deepening economic integration with
China is largely market-based, while exchange with South Korea has a growing official component.
Whatever its perceived political utility in the short-run, this particular profile raises serious questions
about the transformative effects of South Korea’s engagement with the North.

CONCLUSION

Despite the onset of the nuclear crisis in 2002, North Korea’s trade grew steadily in the first half of thedecade. Moreover, for a combination of reasons the illicit share of that trade appears to have shrunk,
possibly signaling the effectiveness of interdiction activities and sanctions. Our best guess is that North
Korea has run current account deficits (inclusive of revenues from illicit sources) throughout the sample
period 1990–2005, and that those deficits widened in the first half of the 2000s.
The discrepancy between the estimated current and capital account balances in most years
suggests that North Korea is generating more revenues than it is spending. One possible explanation isthat public estimates of earnings from illicit sources may be too large, either singularly or jointly, or these
activities may have been successfully impeded in recent years.
North Korea’s deficits have to be financed and observable transfers and capital inflows into North
Korea are trending up at least through 2005. These transfers and capital flows come mostly from twosources, China and South Korea. Two strategic implications follow from North Korea’s growing relianceon these two partners. First while sanctions have no doubt hurt North Korea, they have also resulted ina reorientation of the North Korean economy toward trading and investment partners who are morefavorably disposed toward a strategy of engagement. Although evidence is preliminary, the missile andnuclear tests of 2006 appeared to have accelerated this trend. UN Security Council Resolutions 1695 and
1718 focused fairly narrowly on trade in WMD-related activities, major weapons systems, and luxury
goods. But the resolutions constituted a floor rather than a ceiling on what governments could do. Those
inclined towards sanctions deployed them; those inclined toward engagement did so cautiously (China)
or barely at all (South Korea).

20

The logic of engagement has many foundations, including the use of economic ties as a shortterm political inducement and purely humanitarian arguments in which there is no anticipated quid pro
quo. However, our findings suggest that arguments about the transformative effects of engagement on the
North Korean economy are more likely to hold with respect to Chinese trade and investment with North
Korea, which appears to occur on largely market-conforming terms, than they are with South Korea’s,
which contains a very substantial noncommercial component. South Korea’s economic ties continue to be
characterized by a relatively high level of state involvement, either directly (in the relatively high share ofaid and financial transfers in total bilateral transactions) or indirectly (through subsidies to or guarantees
on nominally commercial transactions), The extensive involvement of the South Korean government ininvestment and trade relations with North Korea, and the very large role played by outright transfers in
the relationship, raises serious questions about the argument that engagement will have the socializing
effects that proponents of engagement suggest. Two of the most prominent examples of South Korea’s
engagement, the Mount Kumgang and Kaesong projects, are literally fenced off from the rest of theNorth Korean economy while an increasing share of the remainder of South Korea’s transactions with theNorth take the form of aid.

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Table 1

Partner country share of North Korean commercial trade
Exports

Partner

2001

2002

2003

2004

China

19.3

25.4

34.8

41.5

South Korea

20.1

25.3

25.5

18.3

Japan

26.1

22.0

15.3

11.6

Thailand

2.8

4.2

4.5

6.4

Russia

0.5

0.3

0.2

0.5

European Union

10.4

7.5

5.7

4.3

MENA

4.1

4.0

4.6

7.6

Other countries

16.7

11.2

9.3

9.9

Partner

2001

2002

2003

2004

China

28.4

23.3

28.1

32.3

South Korea

3.7

4.3

6.6

4.2

Japan

14.5

7.9

5.0

4.2

Thailand

6.2

10.1

11.2

11.2

Russia

3.7

4.5

6.3

9.7

European Union

9.4

13.6

15.5

12.1

Imports

MENA

7.1

9.3

10.1

13.4

Other countries

27.0

26.9

17.2

12.9

Partner

2001

2002

2003

2004

China

25.4

24.1

30.7

36.0

South Korea

9.2

12.4

13.8

9.8

Japan

18.4

13.4

9.0

7.1

Thailand

5.0

7.8

8.6

9.3

Russia

2.6

2.9

4.0

6.0

European Union

9.7

11.3

11.7

9.0

MENA

6.1

7.3

8.0

11.1

Other countries

23.6

20.9

14.2

11.7

Total trade

MENA = Middle East and Northern Africa
Sources: KOTRA (2001, 2002, 2003, 2004); DOTS (2007).

24

Figure 1 Observed commercial merchandise trade
millions
F ig u re of
1 US
O bdollars
s e rv e d c o m m e rc ia l m e rc h a n d is e tra d e
3000

2500
commercial merchandise exportscommercial merchandise imports

2000

1500

1000

500

0
1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

Figure 2 Total current account credits and debits
millions of US dollars
4000

3000

2000

1000

0

-1000

-2000

-3000

current credits range
current debits range
current credits best guesscurrent debits best guess-4000
1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005

25

2003

2004

2005

Figure 3 Arms and illicit exports as a share of commercial goods
and services exports
millions of US dollars
70

60

range

best guess

50

40

30

20

10

0
1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

Figure 4 Official transfers (current and capital) as a share of commercial goods
and services imports
percent
70

60

range

50

best guess

40

30

20

10

0
1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

note: $350 million summit payment from 2001 is considered as three separate transfers of $117 million over 2000-2002 in this figure

Note: $350 million summit payment from 2001 is considered as three separate transfers of $117 million
over 2000–2002 in this figure.

26

2004

2005

Figure 5 North Korean current account balance
millions of US dollars
400

200

0

-200

-400

-600
current account range-800
current account best guess

-1000
1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

Figure 6 North Korean balance of payments statistical discrepancy
millions of US dollars
1000

800

range
best guess

600

400

200

0

-200

-400

-600

-800

-1000
1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

27

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

Figure 7 Ratio of balance of payments transactions to licit merchandise exports
ratio
1.6

1.4
South Korea
China
1.2

1

0.8

0.6

0.4

0.2

0
1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

Figure 8 South Korean and Chinese official support
millions of US dollars
700

600

range, China
South Korea
best guess, China

500

400

300

200

100

0
1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

28

2004

2005

APPENDIX A
RECONSTRUCTING THE NORTH KOREAN BALANCE OF PAYMENTS

In order to measure the external position of North Korea, we adapted the conceptual framework forbalance of payments accounting developed by the IMF and its partners and modified it to accommodate
the unique nature of many of North Korea’s transactions with the rest of the world.35 This appendix
documents the methods used in reconstructing the North Korean balance of payments, detailing thesources used and assumptions underlying the authors’ calculations where uncertainties exist. An analyticalpresentation of the balance of payments can be viewed in table A.1.
The Current AccountMost transactions between North Korea and the rest of the world are recorded on the current account.
In fact, the absolute value of transactions recorded on the current account is roughly 10 times that ofthose made on the capital and financial accounts, underscoring its importance in measuring North
Korea’s external position. The bulk of these transactions involve trade in goods, both commercial
and noncommercial, licit and illicit. With greater magnitude comes greater uncertainty, however, as
demonstrated by the wide range of estimates for the net current account position, and subsequently
the relatively high degree of uncertainty reflected in errors and omissions. Due to the relatively large
magnitude of overall transactions and higher levels of uncertainty recorded in the current account, a large
share of the appendix is devoted to its explanation.
Goods

North Korea’s external transactions are dominated by trade in goods, which include commercial
merchandise trade, noncommercial imports of goods, and the arms trade; illicit transactions estimates
are also recorded under this account. Some uncertainty is introduced to the net goods position throughvarying estimates in trade in arms and illicit goods, but even in scenarios that maximize goods credits andminimize goods debits, the net goods position of the country was in deficit throughout the sample period
1990–2005.
Commercial goods

Commercial goods transactions between North Korea and its trading partners consist of trade in generalmerchandise and goods for processing. Data on general merchandise trade is from the Korea Trade35. The IMF Balance of Payments Manual is available at the International Monetary Fund’s website, http://www.

imf.org/external/np/sta/bop/BOPman.pdf.

29

Box A.1

Discrepancies in trade data between sources and the selection of KOTRA

In this exercise we chose to use data from KOTRA as opposed to other competing sources because we believe it
reports the most plausible numbers for North Korea’s merchandise trade with the rest of the world. The other sourcesthat were considered were the IMF’s Direction of Trade Statistics (DOTS) and the United Nations (UN) Commodity
Trade Statistics Database (COMTRADE). Even a cursory glance reveals significant differences in levels of merchandise
trade reported by these sources, and closer inspection shows large discrepancies in levels of recorded bilateral tradeon a country by country basis. These discrepancies appear to arise for two reasons. First KOTRA strips aid out of its
merchandise trade figures. Second as has been demonstrated in the past national reporting authorities occasionally
misidentify trade with South Korea as being with North Korea (Noland 2000). Furthermore, the exclusion of certain
countries from KOTRA that remain in DOTS and COMTRADE account for some of the discrepancies that we observed.
Where large discrepancies in recorded bilateral trade data exist between KOTRA and DOTS and COMTRADE andwhere countries are omitted from the KOTRA data, we tend to find (1) high levels of volatility in year-on-year tradepatterns and/or (2) suspect commodity composition of bilateral trade, both of which suggest misreporting. Where
high levels of volatility are observed, the median observation is typically a negligible amount of trade and highly
suspect increases in trade occur over one or a small number of years, justifying omission. In many cases large jumps
in exports or imports correspond to suspect commodity composition, for example when countries report importing
large amounts of telecommunications equipment or motor vehicles from North Korea. In sum we believe that KOTRA,
which has screened the North Korean trade data for such anomalies and stripped out aid from merchandise imports,
is the most plausible source for data on North Korean trade.

Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA) and the Korea International Trade Association (KITA).
KOTRA data on merchandise trade serves as the baseline but has omitted inter-Korean trade from thedataset (see box A.1 and appendix C). Inter-Korean trade is recorded by KITA and added to goods
transactions. Where appropriate, trade in goods with other omitted countries was added. Data on trade ingoods for processing is from KITA and only recorded for inter-Korean trade.
Noncommercial goods

Trade in goods associated with noncommercial inter-Korean projects, humanitarian aid, and officiallyreported Chinese assistance corresponding to the import of goods are recorded as a subcategory of goods
trade, entitled “noncommercial merchandise,” which was created for illustrative purposes.36 Data on
inter-Korean noncommercial trade, with the exception of an in-kind transfer associated with the 2000
summit, is from the KITA (table A.1). Data on humanitarian aid comes from UN-OCHA and appears
36. This category of import includes North-South cooperation projects, social and cultural cooperation, and otherinter-Korean economic cooperation, as well as goods imports from South Korea associated with Kaesong, Mount
Kumgang, and the KEDO light-water reactor project. Imports associated with bilateral and multilateral aid,
including humanitarian assistance and heavy fuel imports associated with KEDO, are also recorded here.

30

in Haggard and Noland (2007) (table A.2), the import component of which is either direct in the formof in-kind aid or assumed to finance immediately the import of goods. The South Korean share of aid
recorded by the UN is stripped out to avoid double counting data that already appears in the KITA data.
Data on officially reported Chinese assistance was obtained from the Korea Institute for International
Economic Policy (KIEP).37
Arms and Illicit Goods

The recording of illicit trade includes estimates of trade in arms, drugs, and counterfeited currency andcigarettes. We treat arms trade as possibly unreported or misreported. To compensate the lower range ofcredits and debits in goods omits arms estimates on the assumption that arms may already be recorded inwith commercial trade in goods. Some degree of uncertainty surrounds all of these transactions, and eachtype of “illicit” transaction is recorded with baseline, high, and low-end estimates.
Arms data draws on data from SIPRI and the US Department of State. Ranged estimates anda best guess are created for years in which data from these two sources overlap. The sale of arms abroad
makes up a substantial share of exports of illicit goods in earlier years (table A.3),38 and the acquisition ofarms from overseas is the only item recorded as an illicit import in our balance of payments exercise. Datataken from SIPRI is recorded in constant 1990 US dollars and was adjusted to current US dollars using
World Bank data on the US GDP price deflator.39
Illicit drugs trade estimates are for exports only and are largely based on extrapolation fromnumbers cited in a CRS report for Congress written in 2007 by Raphael Perl and a 2006 congressional
testimony given by David Asher. The authors provide their own best guess estimates for the level ofexports of illicit drugs for 2002–05.
The appearance of counterfeit cigarettes is a more recent phenomenon in comparison toother types of illicit exports going out of North Korea, the revenues from which are recorded only for
2002–05 in this exercise. The authors’ calculations of inflows from the export of counterfeit cigarettes arederived from estimates presented in a Wall Street Journal article by Gordon Fairclough40 and additional
information found in Asher’s congressional testimony mentioned above.41
37. KIEP data covers 1997–2005. We use the $11 million KIEP figure for 1997 for 1990–96 as well.
38. Table A.3 also includes the US Department of State’s estimate of the weapons share of North Korean exports.

This calculation is not based on our own export estimates.

39. A potential caveat of using the SIPRI data is that the data are “trend-indicator values,” intended for use as anindicator of the volume of arms trade. See the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s website, http://
web.sipri.org/contents/armstrad/at_data.html, for more details on the methodology used.
40. Gordon Fairclough. “Tobacco firms trace fakes to North Korea,” The Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2006.
41. Annual North Korean foreign exchange earnings estimates from counterfeiting cigarettes are cited in Fairclough

31

Estimates of revenues from the export of counterfeit currency are derived from Asher (2006) andbased on the authors’ own calculations. More specifically, the authors provide both the high-end and best
guess estimates, and the low estimate is derived from Asher.42
The final category of illicit transaction recorded here involves unrecorded gold exports thatwere sold to BDA. The authors’ calculations were based on underlying data found in Coleman and Lau(2006).43
Services

Accounting for North Korea’s services trade in the balance of payment framework involves only tourism
revenues from Mount Kumgang. We do not record any services imports on debit side, although it islikely that some of the imports associated with humanitarian aid and inter-Korean cooperative projects
may technically fall under services and be misclassified in with goods. In the absence of more detailed
data, however, making this distinction is very difficult if not impossible, and at any rate such imports stillfind their way into the debit side of the overall current account balance.
Services exports are therefore constituted entirely by two types of transactions: rental payments
and fees and spending associated with the Mount Kumgang project. A more detailed examination of theMount Kumgang project is provided in appendix B.
IncomeAs with North Korea’s external services transactions, the income account consists of very little relative
to trade in goods, but unlike the services subaccount, North Korea’s income account is continuously
in deficit throughout the sample period. On the credit side, we include income from North Korean
restaurants operating abroad based on estimates derived from Kim (2007). On the debit side we record
interest paid on debt, which was reported in a National Intelligence Council (NIC) report in 2002.
as $80 million to $160 million per year. Asher notes that the study in which these estimates were derived was
conducted over the past four years. For the purposes of the balance of payments exercise the annual estimates citedin Fairclough 2006 are applied only to years in which the investigation of North Korean cigarette counterfeiting was
taking place, beginning in 2002 and extending through 2005.
42. The low estimate of $1.25 million per year is derived from Asher (2006), citing the detection of approximately$50 million in counterfeit US currency that was traced North Korea over a sixteen-year period. The estimatedmarket value of this currency was 40 percent or less of its face value. Thus, the low estimate is calculated as 0.40*$50
million/16 years = $1.25/year. The upper bound estimate of $60 million in annual counterfeit currency revenues isbased on a scenario in which $150 million in counterfeit bills is printed per year and is sold at 40 percent of its facevalue.
43. Sales of gold to BDA raised an estimated $120M over three years ending in September 2005. This amount was

divided equally over the entire period for the purposes of the balance of payments exercise, yielding estimates of$10M in the last quarter of 2002, $40M in 2003 and 2004, and $30M over the first three quarters of 2005.

32

Current transfers

Current transfers remain in surplus throughout the period with large credit flows arising fromhumanitarian and other aid inflows, noncommercial inter-Korean transactions, and workers’
remittances.44 Much of the credits recorded under current transfers, namely government transfers
associated with aid and other noncommercial transactions, are offset by debits associated with the importof noncommercial goods. Debits on current transfers are essentially nonexistent. The addition of varying
estimates of Chinese aid adds some uncertainty to the magnitude of current transfers. Over the period
from 1990–2005, the net balance on current transfers carries a larger credit than for any other accountbalance shown in table A.1.
Once again, humanitarian aid data was collected from UN-OCHA, and data on noncommercial
transactions was taken principally from KITA. Estimates of current transfers from China in the formof aid include both official aid as reported by KIEP and the authors’ own estimates of Chinese aid
provision.45 US payments for the retrieval of the remains of soldiers missing in action during the Korean
War were taken from a CRS report written by Mark Manyin.
Remittances are recorded from two different host countries: Japan and Russia. However, theirnature, and therefore the way in which they are recorded on the balance of payments, differs. Due tothe permanent residence and unrequited nature of remittances from Japan, these are classified as capitaltransfers in the capital account. Workers’ remittances from Russia are treated as a current transfer in thecurrent account and calculated by the authors using data coming from Zabrovskaya (2006).46
44. Line by line this includes transfers associated with North-South cooperation projects, social and cultural

cooperation, and other inter-Korean economic cooperation, as well as transfers from South Korea associatedwith Kaesong and Mount Kumgang. Transfers corresponding to bilateral and multilateral aid efforts, including
humanitarian assistance, and heavy fuel oil transfers associated with KEDO are recorded in current transfers. Other
current transfers include transfers from the United States to South Korea made as an effort to retrieve the remains ofsoldiers who were missing in action during the Korea war. Nongovernment, or “other” transfers include remittancesfrom North Korean workers abroad.
45. Low-end estimates for 1990–1996 are the authors’ own calculations, and lower bound estimates for 1997–2005

are from KIEP (2005). The KIEP data represents officially reported aid contributions from China to North Korea.
Total food and fuel imports from China are used as upper bound estimates of Chinese aid from 1992–2005, andNorth Korea’s total bilateral trade deficit with China is used as an upper bound estimate for aid from China in theyears 1990 and 1991. Data on food and fuel imports from China is from COMTRADE (2006) and data on North
Korea’s bilateral trade balance with China is taken from IMF DOTS (2006).
46. Zabrovskaya (2006, 100–105) provides data on the locational and occupational distribution of North Korean

workers. Annualizing and applying to the entire sample her estimated remittance rate for Khabarovsky Kray
workers of one-third of monthly wages, yields a figure just below $10 million. Applying this figure to a roughly
equal number of workers thought to be working under official contracts in Russia and elsewhere yields the highend estimate of $20 million. Cutting the best guess estimate in half to account for the seasonal nature of most of
this work and the likelihood that these workers are not employed during the Russian winter yields the lower boundestimate of $5 million. In 1993 labor remittances drop to zero because of a lapse in the treaty guaranteeing the
supply of laborers from North Korea to Russia.
33

Capital Account

The structure of North Korea’s capital account is quite similar to the structure of current transfers
recorded on the current account. Both consist of specific types of transfers and remittances, which are
distinguished from one another by slight differences in the nature of the transactions themselves; current
transfers tend to involve a large set of small, frequent—almost continuous in some cases—transfers thathave an immediate effect on North Korea’s consumption levels, whereas capital transfers involve thetransfer of fixed assets or larger, one-off transfers.
Using the definition above to distinguish between current and capital transfers, we count thetransfer of fixed assets associated with the Kaesong Industrial Complex and the KEDO light-water
reactor project as capital transfers. We also classify a large portion of the 2000 summit payment madein association with the Mount Kumgang project—$350 million to be exact—as a capital transfer. Dataon capital transfers associated with Kaesong and KEDO is available online from KITA and details thesummit payment associated with the Mount Kumgang project are presented in appendix B. Unrequited
remittances from Japan are based on the authors’ calculations with underlying data coming from Japan’s
Ministry of Finance.47
Financial AccountOn net North Korea’s financial account maintains a credit balance from 1990–2005. The accountconsists of three basic elements: direct investment in North Korea (table A.5), trade credits, and changes
in foreign reserves associated with the 2000 summit payment and its gradual expenditure. Trade credits
remain positive throughout the time period in question, changes in reserve assets are recorded as a debit
in all years for which we include data, and North Korea’s net FDI position fluctuates between a credit
and a debit balance, but in sum contributes a net credit to the balance of payments over the whole of theperiod.
Data on FDI into North Korea was obtained from the United Nations Conference on Tradeand Development (UNCTAD).48 Trade credits data was originally recorded in Noland (2000), which
was found in an unpublished report by the OECD. For the purposes of this exercise, the trade credits
47. Estimates in Noland (2000) were made for 1993 and 1994. For the purposes of the balance of payments

exercise, these estimates were extended back to 1990 for both low and high estimates, and forward for low- andhigh-end estimates through 2005 and 2001, respectively. Data on remittances from the Japanese Ministry of
Finance, which is used for the best guess and high estimates from 2002–05, begins and ends in March, and therefore
may not overlap perfectly with other annual estimates.
48. UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development). Various Issues. World Investment Report.

Available at the United Nations’ website, www.unctad.org/wir (accessed January 10, 2007).

34

data is assumed to remain constant at this level throughout the period. The only data on foreign reserve
movements that we record in this exercise is based on the expenditure, over a three-year period, of the$350 million hard currency transfer associated with the Mount Kumgang project. We record this transfer
as a one time credit to the capital account, and debit it at a rate of $116.67 million over a three-year
period beginning in 2000 when the payment was made and assuming that it was exhausted by 2002.

35

Table A.1 North Korea balance of payments: analytic presentation, 1990–2005 (millions of US dollars)

36

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

–873
–165
–538

–674
151
–225

–667
23
–335

–596
111
–236

–336
138
–107

–486
–44
–297

–386
92
–155

–219
227
–13

–187
123
–56

–358
280
–162

–637
–235
–506

–677
–171
–476

–436
80
–277

–448
121
–271

–465
119
–291

–718
–22
–492

–693
–11

–594
–11

–537
–11

–496
–11

–226
–11

–411
–23

–396
–87

–237
–373

–283
–474

–396
–452

–796
–535

–859
–661

–593
–743

–668
–496

–649
–612

–784
–698

–140
329
79

–40
339
189

–90
289
89

–60
299
129

35
84
55

–16
175
50

50
224
132

69
214
127

72
227
129

42
223
13

57
310
116

43
360
152

137
487
216

167
485
221

147
485
201

128
475
182

0
0
0

0
0
0

0
0
0

0
0
0

0
0
0

0
0
0

0
0
0

0
0
0

61
61
61

194
194
194

144
144
144

82
87
85

82
87
85

82
87
85

82
87
85

82
87
85

–45
–42
–44

–45
–42
–44

–45
–42
–44

–45
–42
–44

–45
–42
–44

–60
–57
–59

–40
–37
–39

–34
–31
–33

–35
–32
–34

–13
–10
–12

–16
–13
–15

–11
–8
–10

–13
–10
–12

–13
–10
–12

–13
–10
–12

–13
–10
–12

16
252
132

16
459
235

16
324
168

16
361
186

16
228
119

28
268
146

93
383
236

363
647
503

475
620
545

444
544
492

508
655
579

729
911
817

693
851
770

479
723
599

580
818
697

567
908
735

B. Capital Account[low][high][best guess]

11
86
49

11
86
49

11
86
49

26
86
56

11
71
41

16
41
29

16
41
29

31
56
44

20
45
32

30
55
43

400
425
412

47
72
60

73
87
87

40
46
46

58
65
65

153
162
162

C. Financial Account

127

322

190

196

187

188

190

495

219

173

76

78

71

346

385

301

D. Net Errors and Omissions[low][high][best guess]

735
–48
362

341
–559
–146

466
–299
97

374
–393
–16

138
–396
–121

282
–185
81

180
–323
–63

–307
–778
–526

–52
–387
–196

155
–508
–54

161
–266
18

551
20
338

291
–238
119

62
–514
–121

22
–569
–159

264
–441
30

A. Current Account[low][high][best guess]
Balance on goods
Commercial
Noncommercial
Illicit[low][high][best guess]
Balance on services[low][high][best guess]
Balance on income[low][high][best guess]
Balance on current transfers[low][high][best guess]Table A.2 North-South noncommercial trade (millions of US dollars, South Korean perspective)
Imports from North
Korea

Exports to North Korea

Year

Lightwater
reactor(KEDO)

Supportto North
Korea

Heavy
oil
(KEDO)

Mt.
Kumgang
project

Other
cooperation
projects

Total
exports

Total
imports

Imports
share oftotal trade

Total
Trade

1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006

—
—
17.8
4.0
14.4
35.6
33.7
58.6
23.7
0.5
0.4
0.0

0.2
1.4
8.4
15.6
43.4
104.5
110.6
213.2
270.7
258.5
365.0
419.2

10.8
12.8
29.0
19.8
39.5
11.7
3.5
2.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0

—
—
—
37.6
40.6
14.6
5.8
11.9
16.1
41.7
87.0
56.6

—
—
—
1.2
6.3
17.2
10.4
11.7
4.8
48.5
163.7
238.7

11.0
14.3
55.3
78.1
144.3
183.6
164.0
297.4
315.5
349.1
616.1
714.4

—
—
2.8
0.1
0.1
1.9
2.7
1.4
0.2
0.1
20.1
78.2

—
0.0
4.8
0.1
0.1
1.0
1.6
0.5
0.1
0.0
3.2
9.9

11.0
14.3
58.1
78.2
144.4
185.5
166.7
298.8
315.7
349.2
636.2
792.6

Source: KITA (2006).

37

Table A.3 Total humanitarian assistance, by donor organization(millions of US dollars)Within appeal
Multilateral(through UN)

Year

Outside appeal
BilateralUNagencies

NGOs (including
Red Cross)

Other

Total

1996–97

34.4

11.3

0.0

4.7

0.0

50.4

1997–98

158.4

105.8

1.8

26.5

0.0

292.5

1998

215.9

92.1

0.0

27.2

0.0

335.1

1999

189.9

41.6

0.0

4.3

0.0

235.9

2000

153.1

58.6

0.1

12.5

0.0

224.2

2001

248.0

61.2

1.5

66.8

0.2

377.6

2002

a

220.0

79.2

3.0

58.6

0.0

360.8

2003

133.1

9.6

1.6

42.3

0.0

186.7

2004

151.5

121.4

2.2

24.8

0.6

300.5

b

2005

0.0

61.1

0.7

1.8

0.0

63.6

Total

1,504.2

641.9

10.9

269.4

0.8

2,427.2

a. Includes $99.32 million carried over by the World Food Program (WFP).
b. 2005: Bilateral data includes WFP data not listed in UN-OCHA.
Notes: Does not include China. No consolidated appeal in 2005. Some bilateral assistance does go througha UN organization or an NGO.
Sources: UN-OCHA Financial Tracking Service; WFP (2006).

38

Table A.4

North Korean conventional weapons sales, 1990–2005

Year

WMEAT
(millions of US dollars)

WMEAT(share of exports)

SIPRI(millions of US dollars)

1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005

254
257
194
200
76
64
115
92
101
140
―
―
―
―
―
―

10.4
21.5
13.1
14.8
5.6
7.5
11.1
10.4
14.7
22.0
―
―
―
―
―
―

―
―
―
―
―
52
35
14
2
21
13
77
45
13
13
0

SIPRI = Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
WMEAT = World Military and Arms Transfers
Sources: US Department of State (2002); SIPRI (2005).

Table A.5 Foreign direct investment
in North Korea(million of US dollars)
Year

FDI

1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005

–61
134
2
8
–1
0
2
307
31
–15
5
7
0.15
158
197
113

Source: UNCTAD World Development Report.

39

APPENDIX B
THE MOUNT KUMGANG PROJECT

In the context of the North Korean balance of payments it is not possible to address the Mount Kumgang
project in any one account; accounting for transactions associated with the project cut across thecurrent, capital and financial accounts. It is therefore useful to have a separate section detailing not only
the relevant transactions that took place to facilitate the Mount Kumgang project, but also how theytranspired (see, in particular, Hwang 2005).
The Mount Kumgang project has its origins in two agreements—one in October 1998 and one
in August 2000 immediately following the summit of that year—between the Hyundai group and theNorth Korean government. These agreements called for Hyundai to make $942 million in payments
to North Korea over a 75-month period with the payments strongly front-loaded for exclusive rights
to develop the Mount Kumgang area, as well as seven other projects including the development of anindustrial park which eventually became the Kaesong Industrial Complex. In the first nine months of theMount Kumgang project, it netted $183 million in revenues for North Korea. But the flow slackened
in accordance with the payments schedule, and North Korean provocations led to suspensions anddisruptions in the tours.
Hyundai was subsequently unable to make the payment schedule specified in the original
agreement, and in 2001 the contract was renegotiated, effectively cutting Hyundai’s obligation in half.
The South Korean government, in the form of the Korean National Tourism Organization, assumed agreater role in the operations by effectively providing a subsidy. The original tours were conducted byboat. Investment in the form of several small hotels and other facilities has subsequently been made toaccommodate overland visitors.
Much of the subsequent controversy surrounding the Mount Kumgang project centered on therevelation of a secret $500 million remittance from Hyundai in March 2002, and the further revelations
that followed a National Assembly probe: Most of the money was in cash, commingled with government
money (through a Korean Development Bank loan), and it appeared to constitute a direct payment forthe 2000 summit and was even remitted with the cooperation of the South Korean national security
apparatus.
This transfer took the form of $350 million in cash, $100 million in government aid (paid byHyundai) and $50 million in kind. On June 9, 2000, Hyundai Merchant Marine remitted $200 million
through the Bank of China’s Seoul branch to three North Korean accounts opened in the Bank of
China’s Macau office. Hyundai Engineering and Construction remitted $150 million through its London
office and through HSBC in Singapore into these accounts on the same date. Hyundai Electronics
remitted $100 million to Hyundai Engineering and Construction in London, which in turn remitted40

these funds to North Korean accounts in Singapore and Austria. The remaining $50 million were
nominally earmarked for the Pyongyang gymnasium and other aid projects.
Hyundai claimed that these were legitimate business payments. However, the project was notviable and quickly came to involve more direct government involvement and subsidies; the indictment ofChairman Chung Mon-hun that ended in his suicide was precisely over allegations that he had embezzled
corporate funds in order to bribe public officials to support Hyundai’s North Korea business. In 2001
the Korea Tourism Organization borrowed 90 billion won from the North-South Cooperation Fundto invest in the project. The Roh government also provided subsidies to road building for the project in
2004, and other subsidies to the project were not finally terminated until the nuclear test of 2006.
The transactions detailed above are accounted for in full in various parts of the North Koreanbalance of payments. In-kind transfers find their way into the current account in the form of bothmerchandise imports and current transfers' credits. We elected to record the $350 million transfer of hardcurrency is recorded in the capital account on the grounds of its large magnitude and because we exhaustit over a multiyear period. On-net transfers associated with Mount Kumgang involve a nontrivial amountof cash, of which only a small fraction is accounted for in official data provided by South Korea throughKITA. The inclusion of these transactions is highly visible in our reconstruction of the North Koreanbalance of payments and critical to the measurement and analysis of North Korea's external position.

41

APPENDIX CTRADE DATA SELECTION

Data on North Korean trade flows is available from KOTRA, the IMF’s DOTS, and COMTRADE.
KOTRA and DOTS provide data on North Korea’s overall merchandise trade balance and a bilateral
breakdown of North Korean trade, and mirror statistics from COMTRADE make available thecommodity composition of North Korean trade as reported by the country’s trading partners. North
Korea’s trade data as reported by these three sources in many cases do not agree, with discrepancies arisingfrom different reporting practices, country selection, and the inclusion of potentially erroneously reported
data in both DOTS and COMTRADE. Ultimately KOTRA data is used in this paper for North Korea’s
base-case merchandise trade position, and data from DOTS is added where evidence against doing so islacking.
Discrepancies due to differences in reporting practices and data cleaning procedures emerge ina comparison of North Korea’s bilateral trade data as reported in KOTRA and DOTS, where sufficientcountry overlap can be found. KOTRA, for example, removes merchandise trade arising from bilateral aidtransfers, while DOTS leaves bilateral aid in the merchandise trade series, as valued by the donor country.
The most pronounced example of this source of discrepancy between the two datasets shows up inreported imports from Japan in 2001, where North Korean imports from Japan jump to $1169 million
in 2001, up from $225 million in 2000. In 2002 this number drops to $146 million and steadily declines
thereafter. Alternatively, KOTRA reports that North Korean merchandise imports from Japan totaled$249 million in 2001, $920 million dollars less than the level of imports reported by DOTS. Looking at
the commodity composition of Japanese exports to North Korea in 2001 in COMTRADE, it becomesapparent that the source of this discrepancy comes from approximately $1 billion in rice49 shipped fromJapan—presumably in the form of food aid—that was likely either stripped from the KOTRA series or
repriced by KOTRA.50

49. Rice in the husk or not, not further prepared.
50. According to COMTRADE, Japan exported 500,000 metric tons of rice valued at $1,017 million in 2001. Thisimplies that the reported price of Japanese rice exports for this year was $2034/MT, over 10 times the 12-monthaverage price of 5 percent broken milled white rice of $173/MT for 2001 reported in the IMF Primary Commodity
Prices database. Interestingly if we subtract out the $1,017 million of rice imports from the $1169 million of total
imports from Japan for 2001 as reported in DOTS, reprice the rice exports based on the average price of milled
white rice for 2001, adjust by a factor of 1.1 for cif, and add this number to the difference between the IMF’s total
North Korean imports from Japan and COMTRADE’s Japanese rice exports to North Korea, the value of North
Korea’s total imports from Japan would be approximately $247 million for 2001, almost equal to the $249 million
reported by KOTRA. It should be noted that this exercise is merely for illustrative purposes, and that ultimately it
is impossible to tell whether the source of the enormous discrepancy discussed above comes from an exercise such as
this, a stripping out of “aid,” or some other factor.

42

A second source of discrepancy between KOTRA and DOTS trade data for North Korea comesfrom country selection; there are many countries that are included in the DOTS trade series that havebeen omitted from the KOTRA series. This does not necessarily mean that North Korea’s world trade
totals as reported by DOTS exceed KOTRA in every year, and indeed, KOTRA reports higher levels ofNorth Korean trade with the rest of the world through most of the early 1990s. But country selection
does appear to account for a substantial share of the difference between KOTRA and DOTS trade totals
for years in which bilateral trade data is available from both sources.51 Looking at trends in reported tradeflows and the commodity composition of trade between North Korea and countries that appear only in DOTS
reveals anomalies that in many cases can justify their removal from the trade series.
It may be the case that, for certain countries, customs officials are mixing up North and South
Korea in the trade data they ultimately report to the UN. While it is difficult to prove this from the pointof view of imports into North Korea, what these countries report as importing from North Korea can be
more revealing. According to COMTRADE, Brazil, for example, reports a dramatic increase in imports
from North Korea between the mid-1990s up through the present, the composition of which appears
to be much like that of South Korea’s. Forty-two percent of Brazil’s reported imports from 1990–2006
are classified as machinery and transport equipment, including office machines, telecommunications
equipment, and other electrical machinery. Such a dramatically “spiked” pattern of trade over time as wellas the suspect commodity composition of exports may help to explain why bilateral trade data between
the North and Brazil appears to have been omitted from the KOTRA series, and explains why we have chosen
not to include it in this exercise. Other notable examples of questionable reporting of imports from
North Korea include Ghana, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Honduras, all of which report large “spikes” ofimports of either telecommunications equipment, household appliances, automobiles, automobile parts,
or other types of complex manufactures that track closely the commodity composition of South Korean
exports.
Based on these and other similar observations, KOTRA's data on North Korean commercial
merchandise trade seems more plausible than the alternatives. This is not to claim that the KOTRA trade
data is flawless; it is likely that some countries that should have been included were omitted, and therefore
KOTRA's trade data likely understates, to some small degree, North Korea's overall level of trade. It
is likely, however, that the North's net trade position in goods is fairly accurate, especially when comparedwith other more uncertain transactions that we record in the North Korean balance of payments. In
determining and analyzing North Korea's external position, KOTRA's data provides the most accurate
insights into trade in goods.
51. Currently we have bilateral trade from DOTS for all years in this study (1990–2005) but only have a bilateral

breakdown of trade data from KOTRA for 2001–04.

43

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