Posts Tagged ‘Sanctions’

North Korea denies weapons sales to Russia

Thursday, September 22nd, 2022

By Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein

As per New York Times earlier this fall, US intelligence believes North Korea has sold weapons to Russia in aid of its attempt to invade Ukraine. North Korean authorities, for what it’s worth, have publicly denied this. Judging from the evidence reported so far, it doesn’t yet seem fully confirmed that any such weapons trade has in fact taken place. There’s little reason to doubt it’s been discussed — Russia is probably weighing all conceivable options for arms purchases and North Korea isn’t usually a picky seller. AP:

In a state media report Thursday, an unnamed North Korean defense official told the U.S. to stop making “reckless remarks” and to “keep its mouth shut.” Biden administration officials earlier this month confirmed a declassified U.S. intelligence assessment that Russia was in the process of purchasing arms from North Korea, including millions of artillery shells and rockets, as Moscow attempts to ease severe supply shortages in Ukraine worsened by U.S.-led export controls and sanctions.

The North Korean statement came weeks after Moscow described the U.S. intelligence finding as “fake.”

North Korean arms exports to Russia would violate United Nations resolutions banning the country from importing or exporting weapons.

(Source: Kim Tong-Hyung, “North Korea denies sending arms to Russia amid Ukraine war,” AP News September 22nd, 2022.)

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North Korean coal trade: the questions that really matter

Tuesday, December 8th, 2020

By: Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein

I have long argued, on this blog and elsewhere, that the question of North Korea and economic sanctions is not a binary one. We don’t have either perfect sanctions implementation with complete suppression of trade, or smuggling and trade under the radar, with or without the complicity of the Chinese government, making sanctions on North Korea meaningless. Rather, sanctions were never going to work perfectly to begin with — government measures rarely do. What sanctions do do, however, is to impose high additional costs to anyone trading with North Korea. North Korea would still import and export sanctioned goods to some extent, but reap lower revenues from exports and pay more for imports.

US intelligence claims over the past few months have contained some information that is highly relevant to that end. Ship-to-ship (STS) transfers are complicated and expensive, but it seems that this method of transferring North Korean coal to Chinese buyers has begun to decrease. Wall Street Journal reports (paywall) that direct deliveries to China, through the Ningbo-Zhoushan area, have increased in frequency over the past few months. Chinese ships have also gone directly to North Korea’s Nampo port to fetch coal deliveries.

The UN Panel of Experts noted this trend already in its March 2020 report:

67. Ship-to-ship transfers in the Gulf of Tonkin (see S/2019/691, para. 20) have decreased substantially in favour of increased deliveries to the Ningbo-Zhoushan and Lianyungang port areas in China. The increase reinforces the need for port and customs authorities to heighten scrutiny of vessels and their shipping documentation, and to impound any vessel suspected of transporting prohibited items.

We still don’t know how widespread such trade is, but it significantly lowers the transaction costs of North Korea’s coal trade, and thereby lessens the impact of sanctions on North Korea’s export revenue.

What about proportions?

  • According to the WSJ report and US intel sources, North Korea exported 4.1 million metric tons of coal between January and September 2020.
  • No one knows what North Korea paid, but the WSJ report assumes a price of $80–100 per ton in 2020. This places the value of the exports between $330 and $410 million.
  • Is that a little or a lot? Well, it depends. According to UN Comtrade figures, North Korea exported on average 1.7 million metric tons of coal per month to China in 2015. In contrast, 4.1 million metric tons between January and September gives close to half a million metric tons per month. In April 2016, coal exports totalled 1.53 million metric tons, to the tune of $72.3 million.
  • The WSJ figures place North Korean revenue at $36.6-$45.5 million on average per month for January-September. Using the 2016 April figure as a benchmark, it is absolutely not an insignificant number. At the same time, it is nowhere near — really, less than half by one measure — what North Korea has received for its coal exports in the past.

This by no means gives a perfect representation of the proportions at hand. After all, both 2015 and 2016 were boom years for North Korean coal exports to China. At the same time, judging from this limited data, we should not assume that things are back to normal only because China’s sanctions implementation seems to have begun to taper off. At the moment, it’s also very difficult to tell what proportions of the downturn in trade originates from North Korea’s own, self-imposed border lockdown, and from sanctions respectively.

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September, 2020: the Latest UN Panel of Experts Report and the North Korean Economy

Tuesday, September 29th, 2020

By: Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein

The latest UN Panel of Experts Report is out. Some points relating to the overall state of the North Korean economy, after a quick read:

  • Ship-to-ship-transfers of fuel (“refined petroleum products”) continue. This is nothing new. Only between January and May 2020, North Korea is estimated to have broken the sanctions-mandated ceiling of 500,000 barrels per year. As I have argued elsewhere, many times, even with STS transfers and other illicit methods to flout sanctions, they are taking a toll on the North Korean economy since they are expensive. North Korea has to compensate sellers for the added risk of smuggling somehow. So sanctions, in this sense, are certainly not without impact.
  • Coal deliveries are also happening via STS and other transportation means. Again, this is not new, and rather, is part of the steady state for North Korea under sanctions. As with oil and fuel products, North Korea must be taking a financial hit to compensate buyers for the added risk of violating sanctions. The report says that coal exports resumed, after a Covid-19-pause, in March of this year.
  • The report does note that illicit tanker deliveries decreased thus far in 2020 as compared to 2019. Whether that means that less fuel was actually supplied is unclear. Indeed, according to the report, the delivery tankers had higher capacity than in the past.
  • Overall, it seems that judging from the PoE estimates, North Korea may not be suffering from fuel shortages at all, on the whole. Of course, we know next to nothing about how the illegally imported fuel is used and distributed within the country. Fuel prices have, however, not really been outside the span of the generally normal (or at times even lower), suggesting that the amounts coming in are roughly similar to normal times.

One quick reflection on the exports issue, particularly of coal and other sanctioned export goods: it’s clear that coal trade is happening, seemingly relatively undisturbed, on a scale that is troubling from a sanctions-implementation perspective. What’s tricky, though, is that we know fairly little about proportions. How much coal is North Korea actually able to sell, and to what prices?

As of now, all we know is that coal is being exported on a substantial scale. From an analytical perspective, that leaves a lot to be desired.

However, it is crucial to note the myriads of ways in which the government is able to at least partially compensate for the loss in export income stemming from sanctions. The report details several of these, including a wide range of cyber crime.

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North Korea gearing up for hard times

Friday, July 10th, 2020

By: Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein

An editorial in today’s Rodong Sinmun emphasizes that fighting the “global pandemic” is more important than economic construction. For Korean-speaking readers, the message comes near the end of the editorial on Friday July 10th, and reads:

그것은 인민들의 생명과 건강을 보호하고 증진시키는것을 최급선무로, 가장 영예로운 혁명사업으로 간주하고있기때문이다.그 어떤 경제건설성과보다 대류행전염병의 침습을 막는것을 더 중요하게 여기고 이 사업에 최선을 기울여야 한다는것이 우리 당의 요구이다.

(Source: 김병진, “인민의 생명안전을 굳건히 지키는것은 우리 당의 제일중대사,” Rodong Sinmun, July 10th, 2020.)

This is not a new message, and it’s been re-stated in various forms in North Korean state media over the past few months. As I write in this article at 38 North, the recent emphasis on the chemical industry carries the same message: don’t expect any major changes in the external economic environment anytime soon, whether it be in conditions relating to sanctions or Covid-19.

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Some N Korea-China trade stats for 2019

Monday, March 23rd, 2020

By: Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein 

Nikkei Asian Review analyzes some 2019 trade data:

North Korean exports to China increased 10.8% to $216 million, while imports jumped 16.8% to $2.59 billion, the Seoul-based Korea International Trade Association said Thursday.

The trade deficit increased by $350 million, four times the deficit from 2016, before the U.N. imposed heavy sanctions on top North Korean exports like coal and apparel.

Clocks and watches were North Korea’s biggest export to China last year at $49 million. Parts for time pieces ranked high among its imports, and the country is believed to be assembling clocks on contract from China.

(Source: “Wigs and watches keep North Korea’s economy ticking under sanctions,” Nikkei Asian Review, March 20, 2020.)

In reality, things are of course much more complicated than this. At a time when sanctions remain but we still pretty much know that China has reverted to importing certain banned items from North Korea, North Korea’s effective trade deficit cannot really be studied through official data. Likely, imports that come through and are recorded officially correspond, to some extent, to exports flowing outward under the radar.

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Daily NK: North Korean laborers reach Russian construction sites despite sanctions

Wednesday, July 24th, 2019

Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein

Daily NK reports:

“Recently, there have been many North Korean workers coming in to Russia. They are arriving at Khabarovsk Station via Tumangang Station. North Korean workers are usually dispatched to Khabarovsk and Ussuriysk and most of them are construction workers,” a source familiar with local affairs told Daily NK.

According to the source, a considerable number of new laborers are being deployed to Russian construction sites as well as some factories and logging sites.

In an interim report submitted to the United Nations in March, Russia said that the number of North Korean workers staying in Russia has declined from 30,023 at the end of 2017 to 11,490 at the end of 2018. Although the number with officially granted visas may have declined, it is believed that these new workers are entering Russia using methods other than a work visa, such as student or temporary stay visas.

It has been reported that in addition to the hard labor, those working in Russia have poor working conditions. They are cooking and sleeping at the same construction site at which they are working.

“North Korean workers are working at a building that is attached to the Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok’s Russky Island, and work an average of 15 hours per day from 5:00 am to 9:00 pm or even until 11:00 pm,” he said.

“The daylight is long these days in Russia, so they are working until late in the night without lighting. North Korean workers are really angry because they are worked like dogs. And even though they are working so hard, they do not have much left after paying $1200 dollars to the North Korean company they work for.”

Even under such dire circumstances, North Korean laborers still value being sent to Russia because they can make significantly more money than they can in North Korea.

Some of the highly skilled North Korean workers who have been working in Russia for more than three years are said to be finding their own work under the condition that they pay $1000~$1300 dollars to the state enterprise as a loyalty contribution.

“Those with good skills are freelancing. Some even make $2000~$3000 dollars a month,” a separate source in Russia told Daily NK.

“Russian companies also prefer North Korean workers. Their wages are cheap and they are skilled and work very fast. That is why Russian construction companies prefer to hire them.”

Currently in Russia, there are about 23 North Korean enterprises including Rungrado, Namgyong, Cholsan Trading Company, and Number 17 Construction Company that manage North Korean workers. “A Khabarovsk-based North Korean trading company manages about 2000 North Korean workers,” said the source.

However, it has been reported that recently-dispatched North Korean workers in Russia cannot freely move or contact the outside world as they are under tighter surveillance.

Source:
North Korean laborers reach Russian construction sites despite sanctions
Jang Seul Gi
Daily NK
2019-07-24

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China-North Korea trade up in first half of 2019

Wednesday, July 24th, 2019

Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein

A fairly minor recovery from an already low level, one should bear in mind. SCMP reports:

China’s trade with North Korea recovered in the first half of this year after a sharp fall in 2018, Beijing said on Tuesday.

The announcement comes as ties between the countries improve, with Chinese President Xi Jinping making his first state visit to Pyongyang last month.

Total trade with North Korea reached US$1.25 billion between January and June, up 14.3 per cent compared to the same period a year earlier, Ministry of Commerce figures showed.

Exports to North Korea amounted to US$1.14 billion – a rise of 15.5 per cent – while imports rose 3.2 per cent to US$110 million.

China remains North Korea’s sole military ally and biggest trading partner. Trade in 2018 was worth US$2.7 billion, down 48.2 per cent year on year, the Seoul-funded Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency said last week.

North Korea’s trade with China fell sharply in 2018, taking its overall foreign trade to less than US$3 billion for the first time since North Korean leader Kim Jong-un took power in 2011.

[…]

Zhang Baohui, director of the Centre for Asian Pacific Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, said China was “doing its work under the UN sanctions regime” but that North Korea might have the strength to work through its economic hardships.

“The country is always economically isolated from the rest of the world, and North Korean people are used to this situation. In fact, self-reliance has been their way of life for a very long time,” Zhang said.

Article source:

China-North Korea trade up 14.3 per cent in first half to US$1.25 billion
Lee Jeong-ho
South China Morning Post
2019-07-24

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Taxes increase on some North Korean markets

Friday, May 3rd, 2019

By Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein

This sort of news is very interesting, particularly in context: I’ve heard from people who deal with North Korean firms that some of them have received orders to tighten up their accounting, and report their assets to the state in greater detail. Taken together, these snippets of information suggest an overall difficult economic situation, though not desperate or in crisis-mode, where the state is taking more and more measures to drive in cash from the public.

Daily NK:

Sales fees levied on private distributors have risen in some areas of North Korea. The fees are managed by North Korea’s collection agency and essentially provide a source of tax revenue for the state. Private distributors are expressing discontent over the changes as many are suffering under the country’s already poor economic conditions.

“The authorities recently began demanding outrageous and unfair selling fees from private distributors,” said a South Pyongan Province-based source on April 25. “Collection offices (i.e. tax offices) attached to local people’s committees are required to pay varying fees depending on the product, and the number of fees have been doubled.”

These de facto tax offices were established in each city and county as part of the July 1 Economic Management Improvement Measure in 2003 and are managed by the Ministry of Financial Administration. The offices collect fees for land use, market stalls, and various other reasons.

“The authorities are demanding a huge amount of fees to gain control over and restrict the activities of private business people who live in Pyongsong but bring in products from Sinuiju, Rajin-Sonbong, Nampo and Hyesan,” said a separate source in South Pyongan Province.

“Soybean oil sellers, for example, had to pay 3% of their income before, but now have to pay twice that amount.”

The skyrocketing fees are likely due to the fall in tax revenue arising from the economic difficulties the country is facing.

“The government increased the fees they were collecting just as incomes fell among private business people,” she said. “The authorities are simply taking money from the people to make it seem like the state is self-sufficient.”

North Korean authorities have made the fee system more sophisticated while raising fees as part of efforts to generate more income for the regime.

Article source:
North Korea doubles de facto sales tax levied on distributors in some areas
Mun Dong Hui
Daily NK
2019-05-03

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The sanctions relief that North Korea might be asking for

Thursday, February 14th, 2019

By: Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein

Some interesting reporting by Hankyoreh, citing South Korean government sources familiar with the US-North Korea negotiations, suggests that North Korea is pushing for two concessions from the US:

According to a South Korean government source closely acquainted with the North Korea-US talks, Kim reaffirmed the North’s willingness to dismantle its Yongbyon nuclear facilities during the first round of working-level talks in Pyongyang on Feb. 6–8, while demanding the partial loosening of sanctions as a corresponding measure for allowing inspections of the facilities. The North Korean side said it “could offer more generous steps” if the US were to even partially loosen sanctions as a corresponding measure, the source reported.

Politically,  this makes a great deal of sense. Yongbyon dismantlement would make for great photo-ops and video clips, regardless of the actual substantive meaning of such actions. For North Korea, partially loosened sanctions would be highly beneficial for several reasons. For one, it could be a tacit signal to China and Russia that the US will no longer be as vigilant on sanctions monitoring as it has been in the past. Moreover, should North Korea push for the ceiling on its oil imports to be lowered, that would likely save the regime substantial amounts of hard currency that it now has to put towards more expensive, illicit transfers and the like. Gas prices in the country have stabilized over the past few months, but are still higher than in normal times. (I dig into this more in a new working paper published by the Stimson Center, click here to read it.)

And not least, any sanctions exemptions on Mt Kumgang and the like could – hopefully, from the regime’s point of view – be a first step to more South Korean investments and cash flows to tourism in North Korea, one of Kim Jong-un’s hallmark industries.

According to Hankyoreh, none of this is out of the question:

Biegun stated in no uncertain terms that the US would not be able to loosen or lift sanctions. At the same time, he reportedly suggested it may consider loosening sanctions if North Korea were to offer the Yongbyon dismantlement “plus something extra.”

And:

Accordingly, they suggested that if North Korea adopts a more forward-thinking approach on the Yongbyon dismantlement issue during negotiations, the US may grant priority consideration to projects involving inter-Korean cooperation, including partial resumption of the Kaesong Complex and Mt. Kumgang tourism. This prediction was based on the limited range of measures available to the US without touching the current sanctions framework. Indeed, many Korean Peninsula experts have noted that the Mt. Kumgang tourism venture individually would not be in violation of UNSC resolutions and suggested that it should be quickly resumed.

I’m no judicial sanctions expert, but I suspect that this might not be entirely accurate. If sanctions are strenuous enough to prevent South Korean reporters to bring in laptops into North Korea, it’s easy to wonder how large-ish-scale tourism to North Korea through Kumgangsan wouldn’t risk violating sanctions. In a way, the multilateral UN sanctions are easier to loosen in practice. A strong, even informal signal from the US to China could make the latter re-interpret its sanctions interpretations, and make monitoring and enforcement much more loose. Truck traffic has reportedly already increased across the border compared to a few months ago, and it’s a trend that’ll likely become increasingly more pronounced the less vigilant the US is about pushing for rigid sanctions implementation.

Article source:
N. Korea demands partial relaxation of sanctions in exchange for Yongbyon inspections
Kim Ji-eun
Hankyoreh
2019-02-14

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North Korea’s economic growth – from Pyongyang’s perspective

Monday, October 15th, 2018

By Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein

Has North Korea’s economy been growing under sanctions? That’s what an economist in Pyongyang claims. In a recent interview with Kyodo (published here by Japan Times), Ri Gi Song at Pyongyang’s Institute of Economics at the Academy of Social Sciences, claimed that North Korea’s GDP per capita grew by 3.7 percent in 2017, a year during which the country was virtually banned from selling its most crucial export goods, and faced very harsh conditions for importing crucial resources such as oil and fuel. When factoring in population growth, the GDP-growth-figure diminishes somewhat to 3.2% (see below), but it’s still firmly in the same range.

Strange as it may sound, it is possible to imagine that North Korea’s economy wouldn’t contract severely during a year of sanctions. GDP growth alone is a poor way of measuring long-run, sustained economic growth and progress. While it may sound counter-intuitive, the sanctions, while depressing the economy in certain ways, may have boosted it through other mechanisms. The ban on coal imports from North Korea, for example, may well have boosted certain industries, as this blog has covered in the past. Because exports have dwindled drastically, the price at which North Korean coal can sell – domestically as well as internationally – gets much, much lower than when it could be sold in greater quantities on a somewhat competitive market. So with lower prices for factors of production, industry could certainly experience growth in the short-run. But this would only be a temporary and meaningless boost, since the losses from unsold goods abroad would be much greater.

In other words, Ri may be partially right, but numbers are also likely inflated for political reasons. Here’s an excerpt from the interview, annotated with comments:

North Korea’s economy grew 3.7 percent in 2017, a professor of a think tank in Pyongyang said in brushing aside the view that the country has faced an economic contraction against a backdrop of international sanctions.

Even though North Korean economic data has become somewhat more public and plentiful in the past few years, there are still undeniable political imperatives in publishing data that makes the country appear resilient in the face of sanctions. After all, if sanctions aren’t “working” (whatever that may mean), what’s the point in keeping them? That, of course, doesn’t mean that such figures are accurate, wholly or partially.

Ri Gi Song, a professor of the Institute of Economics at the Academy of Social Sciences, said in a recent interview with Kyodo News that North Korea has achieved economic expansion without depending on other nations.

Well, he would say that, since that is how Juche is spoken. That doesn’t mean it comes from a place of literal belief; it’s simply what you say if you’re a North Korean economist speaking from your official position, and shouldn’t be read as an expression of delusion or the like.

Ri said gross domestic product totaled $30.70 billion in 2017, up from $29.60 billion in 2016. It is very rare for North Korea to disclose its GDP and also the first time that the country’s GDP data in the past two years have been unveiled.

But it is impossible to verify the accuracy of the figures, as the professor did not make public other economic indicators such as consumer spending, investment and inflation rate.

Although a report released by South Korea’s central bank showed in July that the North’s economy shrank 3.5 percent in 2017 from the previous year, Ri shrugged it off, saying Seoul’s calculation is “only an estimation.”

Ri is right that South Korea’s figures are only estimates, albeit careful ones based on models developed and refined (presumably) through years of experience. But the thing is, Ri’s official North Korean figures, too, are only an estimate. Even in the best of situations, no GDP-figure is exactly certain and precise. To calculate as vast of an “object” as a country’s economy, some assumptions inevitably have to be made. One of them is that various forms of reporting is generally accurate.

In the case of North Korea, however, this problem is incomparably worse than in open, democratic free market-economies. Let’s assume for a moment that the North Korean government genuinely is eager and willing to generate real, trustworthy and truthful economic statistics, which in many ways does seem to be the case. Even so, how do you generate accurate accounts reporting in an environment when the going principle for a long time has been that planning targets must be met regardless of actual conditions? And with so many different forms and models of enterprise in action throughout the country, seemingly with little but perhaps improving consistency across the board, how would it be reasonable to expect the North Korean government to be able to calculate a reasonable GDP-figure? That’s not even getting started on the investments-portion, a crucial variable to determine growth. Private investments into partially private enterprises is still technically illegal in North Korea, but there are many signs to suggest that it’s taking place on an increasingly substantive scale.

So, even if the North Korean government’s statistical authorities have all the right intentions, I don’t envy their working conditions one bit.

He said North Korea’s population grew to 25,287,000 last year from 25,159,000 in 2016. Based on the figures, the country’s per capita GDP stood at $1,214 last year, equivalent to that of Myanmar.

This means that the actual growth rate claimed by Ri, factoring in population growth, is 3.2%. This, however, still isn’t the “real” growth rate. To get those numbers, we’d need to factor in inflation, and no reliable numbers are available to let us do that. But on the face of it, judging by the price trends for foreign currency and rice through 2016–2017, inflation wasn’t visibly large or out of the ordinary. Even so, we simply don’t know.

In an attempt to overcome the negative impact of international economic sanctions, North Korea has “developed various technologies” under the spirit of “self-reliance,” Ri said, adding the nation has implemented measures to save the utilization of crude oil, for example.

This is certainly true to an extent. Just look at the masses of North Koreans purchasing solar panels for electricity rather than relying on scantly available government supplies of power. And as mentioned above, there is some sense in this argument, if interpreted in a slightly broader manner, that North Korea’s economy may have experienced some gains in efficiency from sanctions, as people are forced to find new, creative ways to get around increasingly tricky conditions. And industry may have gotten a boost from lower energy prices, as may other consumption, since citizens can theoretically spend more on other items if energy prices fall.

Still, this boost would only be marginal, and temporary at best. It certainly wouldn’t create 3.2 percent growth rates, although it might have contributed.

[…]

Ri acknowledged that North Korea has suffered food shortages, but emphasized that the heavy and light industries as well as the chemical sector have been growing and electric power conditions have been improving.

Amid a thaw in inter-Korean relations, Ri expressed hope for economic cooperation with the South.

Full article:
North Korea’s economy grew 3.7% in 2017, Pyongyang professor estimates
Japan Times/Kyodo
2018-10-13

At the end of the day, as Andray Abrahamian points out, neither North nor South Korea publishes their methodology for calculating North Korea’s growth rates, so all we can do is speculate about the assumptions that go into the models.

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