Korea Summit Press Pool via Reuters The North Korean economy saw its steepest decline in 20 years in 2017, according to South Korea’s central…
Korea Summit Press Pool via Reuters
The North Korean economy saw its steepest decline in 20 years in 2017, according to South Korea’s central bank, as the isolated country faces mounting sanctions.
Real gross domestic product in North Korea fell by 3.5% last year, the Bank of Korea said in a statement Friday, the largest decline since 1997 when the country suffered a devastating famine. North Korea doesn’t independently publish figures on economic growth.
Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein, a n associate at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who tracks the North Korean economy, said increasing economic penalties seemed to be the main cause of the decline.
«The difference was in the fall of 2017 when China started to enforce some of these sanctions in a much more stringent way than they had in the past,» Silberstein said.
The United Nations Security Council tightened sanctions on North Korea in August in efforts to contain its nuclear weapons and ballistic-missile program, appearing to remove some exceptions for penalties that might cause «adverse humanitarian consequence.
