The North Korean Economy Contracted Last Year. Maybe.

The Bank of Korea has released its annual North Korean GDP estimates, and the BOK has concluded that the North Korean economy contracted by 1.1 percent. I will briefly discuss why these figures should be taken with large grains of salt, and then apply my own subjective smell test. On methodology: to compute GDP, which is a value-added concept, one needs information on the levels of all economic activities, information on the prices of inputs and outputs, and a recipe book that tells you how many

Source: Peterson Institute (PIIE)