And just how much are overseas North Koreans earning?

Anna Fifield, in this interesting Washington Post story, actually gets a current data point:

Kim is part of the economic lifeline that is keeping North Korea afloat. He manages a factory in a small town outside Dandong, China’s commercial gateway to North Korea, where North Korean women work making clothes for a Chinese company. The women are allowed to keep one-third of the $300 a month they earn, while the rest goes back to Kim Jong Un’s regime in Pyongyang.

In a second article, she provides a little more information:

In the clothing factory, the women work 13 hours a day, 28 or 29 days a month, and are paid $300 each a month — one-third of which they keep. The rest goes back to the government in Pyongyang.

“Even though I want to pay them more, I have to send a certain amount home to my country, so this is all I can give them,” Kim said in his office at the factory. On his desk, an open laptop revealed that visitors had interrupted his game of solitaire.

North Korea is thought to have at least 50,000 workers outside the country earning money for the regime, and 13,000 of them work in Dandong.

Assuming that there are 50,000 workers earning $200 each / month for Pyongyang (a low-ball figure in my opinion), this would imply a cash transfer of $120 million per year. Not a lot of money on a national scale, but remember this is a lower-bound estimate.

At the same time in Geneva, special rapporteur Marzuki Darusman said he was launching an inquiry into the “bonded labourers” working for the DPRK. Read more about this in The Guardian.

The full articles are worth reading here:
“Talking kimchi and capitalism with a North Korean businessman”
Washington Post
Anna Fifield
2014-3-16

North Korea’s growing economy — and America’s misconceptions about it
Washington Post
Anna Fifield
2014-3-13

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