Keys to the Kimdom: North Korea's Economic Heritage and Prospects after Kim Jong-il's Death
What is North Korea? A threat. A headache. A problem. But not so often an economy. The DPRK is much discussed and fretted over, yet our attention tends to be partial and selective.
In this, ironically, we mirror Pyongyang’s own self-distortions. Nowadays – unlike the past, as witness the book from which
the first quotation above is taken – this regime presents itself as a nuclear power, a political fortress, an ideological monolith:
Anything but an economy.