North Korea often refers to its hostile relationship with South Korea. Even if they hate South Korea, North Korea must live well. Because, when that time comes, North Korea’s perspective will change. Because it is my parents’ hometown, I hope that North Korea, my enemy state, will prosper economically. The habit of economic growth will overthrow the habit of hostility.
For North Korea to pursue economic development
1. Develop underground resources
2. Legalize the informal marketplaces and revise the tax law and the Commercial Law
3. Expand social infrastructure such as roads and railways to ensure smooth communication in logistics
4. Establish a vocational technical school in Wonsan
5. Create an economic special zone and experiment with a market economy
6. Cherish even a small domestic market
6. Improve it into a Singapore-style political system
I have mentioned my back.
Although North Korea is in a very difficult environment, reform for economic development is worth trying. I discussed this issue with AI, and at first, AI told a difficult story based on North Korea’s realistic problems and negative historical data. However, I argued that British capitalism also grew by correcting its errors. And when I told the AI that trying and getting feedback are necessary for a goal, the AI gave a very positive response. That’s right. What causes failure is human negative thinking, and what makes us successful is human positive thinking.
For North Korea to generate economic wealth, the circulation of logistics must be active, and social infrastructure such as roads and railways must be built to support that circulation. To build social infrastructure, heavy industry such as cement and steel must be active, and for the development of heavy industry, electricity production must be increased. To increase electricity production, power generation facilities must be built, and these facilities should increase output in the following order: thermal power generation using lignite and other fuels, wind power generation and solar power generation that can be built gradually in small-scale units, and then tidal power or nuclear power generation once a certain level of capital has been established.
In fact, North Korea’s advantage in increasing its electricity production lies in another matter.Who could have known that North Korea, despite its relatively low economic level, would soon need a foundation for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, such as data centers, with its large number of highly skilled workers.
# Power First: A Dual-Track Path for North Korea's Economic Development
## The negativity trap, and the illusion of a single exit
Just as chronic negative thinking drains an individual's energy through rumination and stress, a nation can lose energy the same way. The moment a state defines the outside world as permanently hostile, the policies that follow from that belief — sealed borders, resources diverted to the military and to control — deepen the very isolation that confirms the original belief. North Korea's ideologies of self-reliance (*juche*) and a "powerful and prosperous state" sit squarely on this loop. What makes it different from ordinary national defensiveness is that this narrative is not a tactical posture held by a ruling elite; it is a fixed story imprinted on the population across generations, one that attributes scarcity to external enemies and redefines enduring that scarcity as a virtue. That structure is less a policy than a swamp — one three generations deep.
Does simply granting freedom solve this? Not straightforwardly. Weimar Germany showed that in a society already saturated with humiliation and despair, the machinery of free elections can become the very channel through which negative energy consolidates. Hitler did not seize power through a coup; he was elected. Freedom is not a medicine that automatically produces good outcomes — it is closer to a neutral instrument whose direction depends on who holds it.
But no unfree system has ever corrected that negativity on its own. North Korea has described itself, across three generations, as a benevolent parental leadership — the "father-leader" model. The results of that seventy-year experiment are already documented. The UN's 2014 Commission of Inquiry found that North Korea's human rights record amounted to crimes against humanity, and the famine of the 1990s killed anywhere from several hundred thousand to several million people (OHCHR 2014; HRW 2014). "Benevolent dictatorship" is not a fresh alternative for North Korea — it is the language the regime has already used to justify itself for seven decades, and the outcome is known.
## The realistic conditions and barriers for reform from within
Still, there is a more realistic path than sudden regime collapse or externally imposed democratization: reform led from within the existing power structure, along the lines of China and Vietnam. After Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese Communist Party kept its political monopoly intact while opening the economy, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. North Korea cannot simply copy this path, for structural reasons. Deng was not Mao's son, so he could put some distance between himself and the errors of the Cultural Revolution; Kim Jong Un's legitimacy rests entirely on hereditary succession within the "Baekdu bloodline," so reform risks undercutting the very basis of his own authority. North Korea also faces a comparison China never had to reckon with: South Korea, the same people at many times the income level, sitting just across the border. And a large share of international sanctions is tied directly to the nuclear program, which binds the room for opening to an external variable the regime does not fully control. Reform attempts have not been entirely absent — the July 2002 economic measures, the Kaesong Industrial Complex — but fear of losing control has repeatedly pulled them back.
## Start with the domestic economy, but don't wait for perfect conditions
For this reason, formalizing the *jangmadang* markets — which already underpin much of ordinary North Koreans' livelihood — through tax and commercial law is politically less sensitive and more grounded in reality than pursuing external diplomacy first. But this is not a purely economic policy question. The 2009 currency reform was precisely an attempt by the regime to confiscate the wealth accumulated by market traders (the so-called *donju*, or "money masters") once that wealth came to be seen as a threat. The currency was redenominated at one-hundredth of face value with severe limits on the amount that could be exchanged, triggering runaway inflation and unusually open public anger; the official blamed, Pak Nam-gi, was executed (Wikipedia, "2009 North Korean currency reform"; PIIE; Al Jazeera 2010). That episode shows two things at once: markets have already put down roots too deep to reverse, and the regime will move to crush them the moment it feels threatened. For institutionalization to mean anything, what is needed is not simply a law on the books but a credible expectation that the state will not arbitrarily seize private property again.
That does not mean markets should wait until perfect laws and trust are in place. Development has never actually arrived in that order. England's Glorious Revolution was not a designed institution put in place in advance; it was a corrective response to a crisis — the Stuart monarchy's arbitrary seizure of property. Britain's Factory Acts, likewise, were legislated only after the social costs of unregulated industrialization had already become a visible crisis. Deng Xiaoping himself described his approach as "crossing the river by feeling for stones." Constitutional protection for private property in China was not written into law until 2004 — twenty-six years after reform and opening began. Law did not lead the market; it followed it. So the real question is not whether every precondition is perfectly met in advance, but whether the system can absorb the frictions and crises that markets generate and turn them into the next round of institutional learning. What made 2009 so damaging was not the failure itself, but the fact that the failure produced no learning — the state simply reverted to where it had been.
## Industrialization from existing resources, and a precedent that already exists
North Korea holds the Musan mine, one of Asia's largest open-pit iron deposits, along with substantial anthracite coal reserves (Wikipedia, "Musan mine"; USGS Minerals Yearbook). A cement and construction-materials industry built on iron and coal is one of the few heavy-industry sectors North Korea can genuinely produce with low import dependence — and this is not a hypothetical proposal but a path already tested. In the late 2000s, the Egyptian firm Orascom modernized the Sangwon Cement complex in exchange for a stake in Koryolink, North Korea's first 3G mobile network (38 North 2021; PIIE). That is a real precedent for using a raw material North Korea can actually produce as leverage to draw in outside capital and technology.
## Electricity: the common bottleneck, and its vicious circle
Across every one of these paths, the bottleneck converges on electricity. North Korea's generation mix runs roughly 60 percent hydro to 40 percent thermal, and hydropower has a seasonal flaw: output collapses during the winter dry season, exactly when heating demand peaks (38 North 2023, "Defining the Landscape" and "Hydropower Stations and Policy"). Building up thermal capacity is the right direction in principle, but it runs into aging plants, the difficulty of efficiently burning low-volatile anthracite, and a circular bottleneck in which the rail lines and equipment needed to mine and transport coal themselves require the electricity that is in short supply. Wind is comparatively more accessible because it can be scaled up turbine by turbine, though turbines and grid-stabilization technology still have to be imported. Tidal power sits on genuinely strong natural potential — North Korea's west coast lies on the same tidal system as the Sihwa Lake Tidal Power Station, the world's largest (Wikipedia, "Sihwa Lake Tidal Power Station") — but tidal barrages are among the most capital-intensive forms of renewable generation per unit of capacity, putting them out of reach for now.
## A dual-track strategy: bulk baseload power and high-quality power in special zones
What matters here is that heavy industry and the knowledge economy need different qualities of electricity. Heavy industry is a question of sheer quantity; software and IT services depend instead on the quality of supply — freedom from blackouts and voltage fluctuation — and on international bandwidth. North Korea already has a meaningful pool of technical talent, trained at institutions like Kim Chaek University of Technology. The trouble is that much of that talent is currently channeled into identity-fraud remote employment schemes or state-linked hacking operations, a problem the U.S. Treasury and FBI have repeatedly flagged (FBI 2025; OFAC 2022; DOJ). Converting that capacity into a legitimate export industry requires decoupling it from that pattern first, or no foreign client will trust it.
An IT sector does not have to wait for the national grid to be rebuilt. In the 1990s, India concentrated reliable, dedicated power and connectivity in a small number of Software Technology Parks even while the national grid remained unreliable, and built a globally competitive services export industry inside those enclaves (STPI). North Korea has already run a version of this model itself: the Kaesong Industrial Complex operated on dedicated power and communications separate from the national grid (38 North 2024, "Kaesong Industrial Complex"). In other words, a nationwide buildout of bulk baseload power for heavy industry and small dedicated high-quality power-and-connectivity zones for IT are not mutually exclusive tracks — they can, and should, run in parallel.
## Conclusion: not a sequence, but a circuit
It is correct that electricity, as the common foundation underlying both heavy industry and the knowledge economy, deserves top priority. But rather than pursuing it as a single, sequential national megaproject, the more realistic course is to run two tracks at once: a slow, capital-intensive buildout of bulk baseload power, and a fast-moving track of high-quality power in special zones. If foreign currency earned quickly through IT — much as Orascom's cement investment was repaid with a stake in telecoms — can be recycled into financing the slower, more capital-hungry buildout of the national grid, that circuit, rather than waiting for perfect conditions, may be the most realistic way to actually get development started.
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## References
1. UN Human Rights Council, *Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea* (2014), OHCHR. https://www.ohchr.org/en/hr-bodies/hrc/co-idprk/reportofthe-commissionof-inquiry-dprk
2. Human Rights Watch, "North Korea: UN Condemns Crimes Against Humanity" (Nov. 18, 2014). https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/11/18/north-korea-un-condemns-crimes-against-humanity
3. Wikipedia, "2009 North Korean currency reform." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_North_Korean_currency_reform
4. Peterson Institute for International Economics, "North Korea's Failed Currency Reform." https://www.piie.com/commentary/op-eds/north-koreas-failed-currency-reform
5. Al Jazeera, "N Korea 'executes' top official" (Mar. 18, 2010). https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2010/3/18/n-korea-executes-top-official
6. 38 North, "North Korea's Cement Industry: Further Concrete Leads" (May 2021). https://www.38north.org/2021/05/north-koreas-cement-industry-further-concrete-leads/
7. Peterson Institute for International Economics, "Orascom in North Korea: Don't Leave Me Hanging." https://www.piie.com/blogs/north-korea-witness-transformation/orascom-north-korea-dont-leave-me-hanging
8. Wikipedia, "Musan mine." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musan_mine
9. U.S. Geological Survey, *The Mineral Industry of North Korea*, Minerals Yearbook. https://pubs.usgs.gov/myb/vol3/2019/myb3-2019-north-korea.pdf
10. 38 North, "North Korea's Energy Sector: Defining the Landscape" (Mar. 2023). https://www.38north.org/2023/03/north-koreas-energy-sector-defining-the-landscape/
11. 38 North, "North Korea's Energy Sector: Hydropower Stations and Policy" (Jun. 2023). https://www.38north.org/2023/06/north-koreas-energy-sector-hydropower-stations-and-policy/
12. Wikipedia, "Sihwa Lake Tidal Power Station." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sihwa_Lake_Tidal_Power_Station
13. Federal Bureau of Investigation, "North Korean IT Worker Threats to U.S. Businesses" (2025). https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber/alerts/2025/north-korean-it-worker-threats-to-u-s-businesses
14. U.S. Department of the Treasury (OFAC), "Guidance on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea Information Technology Workers" (May 16, 2022). https://ofac.treasury.gov/system/files/126/20220516_dprk_it_worker_advisory.pdf
15. U.S. Department of Justice, "Justice Department Announces Coordinated, Nationwide Actions to Combat North Korean Remote Information Technology Workers' Illicit Revenue Generation Schemes." https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-coordinated-nationwide-actions-combat-north-korean-remote
16. Software Technology Parks of India (STPI), Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, "About STPI." https://stpi.in/en/about-stpi
17. 38 North, "Kaesong Industrial Complex: A Tortured History and Uncertain Future" (Sep. 2024). https://www.38north.org/2024/09/kaesong-industrial-complex-a-tortured-history-and-uncertain-future/
18. The Diplomat, "Will Marketization Bring Down the North Korean Regime?" (Apr. 2017). https://thediplomat.com/2017/04/will-marketization-bring-down-the-north-korean-regime/
19. Wikipedia, "Jangmadang." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jangmadang
20. Douglass C. North, *Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance*, Cambridge University Press, 1990.
21. Ezra F. Vogel, *Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China*, Harvard University Press, 2011.
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