Something is wrong here: cement, petrochemicals, and steel are second-industrial-revolution technologies; it is very difficult to see how the growth rates claimed for the 1950s and 1960s are compatible with an inability to build cement plants, refineries, and steel mills.
>Even a
>complete panty hose factory was imported, suggesting more attention to
>consumer items. Ultimately these purchases caused North Korea to run
>into problems in servicing its external debt, which in the past twenty
>years has been estimated at between $2 billion and $3 billion. Later
>seven- and ten-year plans have failed to reach projected growth rates;
>still, a CIA study published in 1978 put the DPRK's per capita GNP at
>the same level as the ROK's in 1976, and another study estimated that
>the respective per capita rates were the same up until 1986. DPRK per
>capita GNP probably kept pace at least through 1983, in part because of
>South Korea's 6 percent loss of GNP in 1980. The North's total
>production of electricity, coal, fertilizer, machine tools, and steel
>was comparable to or higher than South Korean totals in the early 1980s,
>even though its population was half that of the South. Such figures,
>however, do not indicate the quality of production in the North, where
>labor productivity is much lower and energy is routinely wasted. Still,
>one critic of the DPRK's economic performance puts its annual average
>industrial growth rate for 1978-84 at 12.2 percent, while noting how far
>North Korea fell short of its own planning targets .
>
>The South's economy revived by the mid-1980s and has forged well ahead
>of the North since then, although not as far ahead as its backers
>claim. Seoul's urban middle class does much better than all but a tiny
>elite in North Korea, but the living standards of the mass of South
>Korean citizens, while better, do not tower over those of average North
>Koreans. In 1979 Kim 11 Sung claimed a per capita income of $1,900, and
>in the late 1980s the DPRK put the figure at more than $2,500; but it is
>not known if the figure is accurate, or how it was arrived at;
>furthermore, it has fallen in the 1990s. Published CIA figures in
>recent years place North Korea at around $1,000 in per capita income.
Note that these are all current-dollar figures $1 today has about 1/2 the purchasing power of $1 back in 1979--so we are talking about a 75% fall in material economic output per capita if the earlier number is to be credited....
>
>For the past two decades the North has clearly fallen behind South Korea
>in what it wants to do namely, race neck and neck or beat the South in
>industrial development. Transportation bottlenecks and fuel resource
>problems have plagued the economy, but above all it has missed out on
>the technological revolution of recent years.
>
>The North does not do badly in goods of the second industrial
>revolution: steel, chemicals, hydroelectric power, internal-combustion
>engines, locomotives, motorcycles, various sorts of machine-building
>items. But it lags far behind in the "communications" technologies of
>the third industrial revolution: electronics, computers, semiconducter
>chips, telecommunications. (North Korea manufactures a Paektusan
>computer, probably with early 1980s technology; the state also imports
>the latest computers it can buy on the international market, while
>sharply limiting personal computers for individual or home use.)
The GDP per capita level in North Korea today appears to be about 8% of South Korea's level. CIA estimates that 1/3 of North Korea's GDP is devoted to its military...