Business and Finance in the DPRK
The international conference "Doing Business in North Korea” was organized by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom (FNF) and the Institute for Far Eastern Studies (IFES), Kyungnam University, on June 10. It brought together renowned experts on business and finance with relation to North Korea.
The auditorium was fully packed as the keynote speaker, Minister of Unification Yong-Pyo Hong, greeted the roughly 250 guests and started off with an insightful speech on the importance of the trust process on the Korean peninsula for economic development in the DPRK.
The conference's first session included insights and opinions from Andrei Lankov from Kookmin University, Mitsuhiro Mimura from the Economic Research Institute for Northeast Asia (ERINA) in Japan, and Eul-Chul Lim from the IFES. The speakers illustrated the development and today's reality of private finance in the DPRK, the emergence of new "capitalistic" consumption opportunities - including inter alia the national Narae debit card, taxi services and smartphones - as well as the appearance and influence of "Donjus" (Korean for "money masters", i.e. North Korea's new affluent middle class). The presentations shed light on the DPRK's relatively unknown concepts of currency exchange and money lending. Lankov claimed that "state banks have played virtually no role in the emergence of the new financial system inside North Korea". According to Lankov, North Korea's current private, small-scale financial system is comparable to pre-modern financial systems of 17th and 18th century Europe.
The second session was concerned with the perspectives on finance, reform, and engagement with North Korea. Wen Cui from Yanbian University gave an outline of the country's recent economic and financial reforms. According to Cui, the DPRK's newly designated economic development zones and the recent "Economic Management Methods of our Style" indicate the country's acknowledgement of the need for economic reform and the government's commitment of opening up economically, especially to the People's Republic of China. Ganesh Thapa, former regional Economist of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) illustrated his experience in providing financial services to North Korean households and William Newcomb, former member of the DPRK sanctions panel, shared his insights on international sanctions and their impact on doing business with North Korea.
NF has, since 2002, supported the economic modernization and development of the DPRK by conducting in-country programs aimed at transferring knowledge of the functioning market economy, strategies of economic modernization, city management and renewable energy.
