North Korean Economy Watch

According to Yonhap:

North Korean trade with the outside world, excluding South Korea, hit a record US$3.8 billion last year, a report said Monday, despite rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

Trade jumped 29.7 percent compared with 2007, the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency, a South Korean trade agency, said in the report.

Last year, North Korea’s exports rose 23 percent to $1.13 billion with imports climbing 32.7 percent to $2.69 billion, the report said. The country still posted a trade deficit of $1.56 billion for the year.

The report also showed that China’s influence on North Korea’s moribund economy is rising quickly.

The communist nation exported $750 million worth of goods to China and imported $2.03 billion last year.

“North Korea’s trade with China hit a record last year and keeps growing,” the report said.

“In the face of the global economic slump and the North’s rocket launch, North Korea’s external trade is expected to shrink this year. But, China’s influence on the North Korean economy is likely to grow further,” it noted.

According to the CIA World Fact Book, South Korea’s 2008 exports totaled $419 billion.

Read the full article here:
N. Korea’s 2008 trade hits record US$3.8 bln: report
Yonhap
5/18/2009

UPDATE: DPRK trade deficit hits record high in 2008
Institute for Far Eastern Studies (IFES)
NK Brief No. 09-5-27-1
2009-05-27

North Korea’s overseas trade (excluding inter-Korean exchanges) continues to grow, in particular with China, and last year recorded the highest amount of trade since 1990.

On May 18, results of analysis by the Korea Trade & Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA) of overseas trade statistics provided to the Korea Business Center in countries around the world revealed that last year’s exports grew by 23 percent (1.13 billion USD), while imports shot up 32.7 percent (2.69 billion USD). The North registered a 1.56 billion dollar deficit, but the overall volume of trade (3.82 million USD) was the highest since the North’s trade amounted to 4.17 million USD 18 years prior.

Business with China, traditionally North Korea’s largest trading partner, totaled 750 million USD-worth of exports and 2.03 billion USD-worth of imports, as the North’s dependence on trade with its neighbor continues to grow. In 2003, trade with China accounted for 32.7 percent of the North’s overseas trade, but that grew to 48.5 percent in 2004, made up more than half (52.6 percent) in 2005, and rocketed up to 73 percent last year.

KOTRA reported that the North’s imports from China have grown by 46 percent over the last decade, and that in 2008, both trade with China and trade deficit with China hit record highs. At the recent Pyongyang Spring Trade Exhibition (May 11-14), 167 companies from 17 countries, including vendors from China, Russia, Germany, Malaysia, Syria, Sweden, Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand showed their wares, but China’s overwhelming presence was felt, with over 100 of the companies present were from the PRC.

Business with Pyongyang’s second-largest trading partner, Singapore, accounted for a mere 3.1 percent (123.6 million USD) of overall trade, although that showed a 116.1 percent increase over 2007. Trade with India and Brazil, the North’s no. 3 and 4 trade partners was relatively stable.

With sanctions in effect by the United States and Japan, the North’s exports to these countries were practically nonexistent, although imports registered 52.1 million USD and 7.7 million USD, respectively.

According to KOTRA, “it appears that, aside from China, North Korea’s overseas trade with other countries showed no significant change,” and, “with negative issues such as the global economic slump and North Korea’s rocket launce, this year North Korea’s overseas trade is expected to contract slightly, while reliance on China will grow as China’s economic influence on the North expands further.”

The National Committee on North Korea (NCNK) published a paper by Karin Lee and Julia Choi which presents the history of U.S. and UN sanctions against North Korea.   A brief review of phases in US economic policy toward the DPRK is followed by longer sections tracking the major changes in U.S. and UN sanctions over the past six decades. Next, there is a summary of measures taken by other relevant governments, particularly following the missile test and nuclear test in 2006 and the rocket launch in April 2009.  The paper concludes with a summary of U.S. sanctions against North Korea from 2000-April 2009, a timeline listing major events in U.S.-DPRK relations and the imposition and relaxing of U.S. sanctions, and a matrix of luxury items prohibited for export to the DPRK in compliance with UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1718 (2006).

You can download the paper in Word format here, or in PDF here.

by Michael Rank

Chinese traders are using fake documents to export goods to North Korea, the Chinese embassy in Pyongyang warns on its website.

The terse, two-sentence statement dated April 4 gives no details of the forged “[North] Korea export licences” scam, but says the North Korean authorities have confirmed the documents are fake and urges “relevant companies not to be easily deceived.”

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the Chinese embassy in Pyongyang has a website at all, and a fairly active one at that. It has plenty of links, on Chinese-North Korean economic, cultural and educational ties, speeches by the ambassador and that sort of thing but not a lot of hard news or useful information.

There is no Chinese comment on the recent North Korean missile test, which is perhaps eloquent in itself, though there is a profile of the current ambassador, Liu Xiaoming, who spent much of the 1990s in the Chinese embassy in Washington (he was minister counsellor 1998-2001) and also in the North American section of the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

There’s also a list of all Chinese ambassadors to the DPRK since 1950, with photographs and brief biographies.

The Chinese website is here and there’s even an English version though it hasn’t been updated since February.

According to Yonhap:

South Korea’s unification ministry on Tuesday closed its bureau on humanitarian aid to North Korea and created a new one to better analyze Pyongyang’s internal politics as part of government restructuring.

The Cabinet approved the ministry’s proposal to shut down its Humanitarian Cooperation Bureau and set up the tentatively-named Political Analysis Bureau, Kim Jung-tae, assistant minister for planning and coordination, said in a press briefing.

Additionally, the South Korean government seems to be laying the political and regulatory groundwork to apply more economic pressure on DPRK.  Again, according to Yonhap:

“The process of monitoring items exported to North Korea has no order of priority, raising concern that there could be a chance of strategic materials going to North Korea,” the audit agency said after an investigation requested by the National Assembly.

Strategic materials refer to equipment or technology used to make nuclear or biological weapons or missiles that are prohibited from being carried into the North. Such materials or items that may fall into that category are sometimes overlooked as the ministry’s checklist, generally used by the tax agency and other government agencies, is too broad, it said.

The ministry failed to spot and investigate packages of black powder, an explosive mixture of sulfur, that were transported into North Korea by a local firm last year, the agency said, though it could not say whether black powder is a strategic material.

The audit agency also found that 270 used computers were exported to North Korea in a possible violation of the law. The computers were initially destined for China, but their owner changed the destination to North Korea without informing the government, it said.

Other computers that were subject to return to the South were not brought back in time, it noted. South Korean law allows citizens to bring computers to North Korea on condition that they bring them back within a year.

The ministry failed to keep track of more than 2,000 computers taken to a joint industrial complex in the North’s border town of Kaesong over the past year by South Korean workers, it said.

The Unification Ministry said in a statement that some of the items noted by the customs agency were not strategic materials, but added it will “prepare a manual to effectively control” such items.

Inter-Korean trade volume reached US$1.82 billion last year, the audit agency said. More than 186,000 South Koreans, not counting over 303,000 who toured North Korean resorts, visited North Korea for business and aid projects during the period, up 18 percent from the previous year, it said.

Read the full stories here:
Unification ministry closes N. Korea aid unit, bolsters intelligence
Yonhap
Kim Hyun
5/12/2009

Audit agency questions lax monitoring of North Korea trade
Yonhap
5/13/2009

DPRK citizens forbidden from entering Google offices?
According to this article in Britain’s Daily Mail:

When you visit the shiny headquarters of Google UK, just a stone’s throw from Victoria Station in London, the receptionist asks you to log-in on a computer with a touch screen.

How else would you sign in? This is one of the centres of the cyber universe.

And then something strange happens. Before you can be issued a pass, the computer asks you to enter into a ‘ nondisclosure agreement’ with Google Inc., a 499-word document.

You must agree not to disclose any confidential information that you might stumble upon while in the building.

In particular, the Participant (that’s you) ‘hereby certifies that he/she shall not  –  directly or indirectly  –  sell, export, re- export, transfer, divert, or otherwise dispose of any hardware, software, source code or technology . . . without obtaining prior authorisation from Google and the appropriate government authorities’.

In addition, you must even certify that you are not a citizen of Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan or Syria.

Some readers will recall a similar incident with LinkedIn a few weeks back (which has since been resolved).

Jackie Chan
Following Jackie Chan’s comments that he believed Chinese people “need to be controlled,”  some Hong Kong residents created a Facebook group dedicated to sending him to the DPRK.  If you are a member of Facebook, check out the group page here.

Great Photos
(Hat tip to David) The Boston Globe posted a great set of photos from North Korea’s boder with China.  I am not easily impressed with photos of the DPRK, but these are good.

(Addition Al Jazeera)
Last night Scott Snyder and Alejandro Cao de Benos were on Al Jazeera’s Riz Khan.  Part 1 here.  Part 2 here.

This week, The South Korean government announced that if the North unilaterally files formal charges against a detained South Korean worker it will reevaluate regulations for its citizens to enter the zone which would require each border crosser to obtain a written guarantee of his safety from Pyongyang before leaving South Korea.  Although the number of South Korean workers allowed to cross the DMZ was reduced after the North’s missile launch, this would effectively prevent South Korean managers from entering the Kaesong Zone and would likely bring an end to operations there.  According to Yonhap:

South Koreans may be barred from visiting North Korea if the communist country takes legal action against a Hyundai Asan employee who has been unlawfully detained by Pyongyang, a government source said Sunday.

The Hyundai employee, who works at the Kaesong Industrial Complex and is identified only by his family name of Yu, has been held for 28 days for allegedly criticizing Pyongyang’s political system and trying to lure a North Korean female worker to defect to the South.

The worker in his 40s has yet to be interviewed by South Korean authorities to determine the exact nature of the detention.

“Under the special arrangement governing the Kaesong complex, the two Koreas must reach an understanding on how to deal with serious offenses involving South Koreans (that carry punishments) exceeding warnings, fines and expulsions,” the source, who declined to be identified, said.

“If Pyongyang takes unilateral action to indict the worker, it will be a violation of the fundamental rules related to cross-border interactions and will compel Seoul to rethink its stance on allowing South Korean to visit the North,” the source stressed.

The bilateral agreement makes clear that Pyongyang should respect the rights of South Korean workers, dwellings and property in Kaesong and the special tourist region in Mount Kumgang on the east coast. The latter has been closed since the shooting death of a female tourist by North Korean guards last July.

He said that if protection for South Koreans nationals cannot be ensured, Seoul will be compelled to review its policies on allowing visits from scratch.

“If this is the case, even employees working at Kaesong will have to get individual, written permission from North Korea that they will not be detained,” the official said.

Such a move could effectively make it hard for South Koreans to go to North Korea, crippling normal operations at the complex just north of the demilitarized zone that separates the two countries.

As of March, 101 South Korean factories operated in the complex, employing about 39,000 North Korean workers. The Kaesong park opened in 2005 and produces labor-intensive goods such as clothing, kitchen wares and watches. (Yonhap)

Given the trajectory of North-South relations this year, it is no surprise that inter-Korean trade dropped 30% in March.  According to Yonhap:

Monthly trade between South and North Korea fell more than 30 percent on-year in March, as tensions ran high over South Korea-U.S. joint military exercise, government data showed Monday.

The two Koreas exchanged goods and services worth US$108.74 million over the last month, down 31.1 percent from $157.9 million in the same period in 2008, the data from the Unification Ministry said.

North Korea sealed the border three times in March, disrupting South Korean production in a joint industrial complex in the North’s border town of Kaesong. Pyongyang imposed the ban in retaliation against a joint military exercise South Korea staged with the United States from March 9 to 20 south of the border.

Pyongyang blasted the joint exercise as a rehearsal for a “second Korean War,” while the two allies say the annual drill is purely defensive.

More than 100 South Korean firms operate in the Kaesong industrial venture, just an hour’s drive from Seoul, joining their capital and technology with North Korea’s cheap but skilled labor.

North Korea demanded the South raise wages, pay fees for land use and revise existing contracts for the Kaesong venture during inter-Korean government talks last week, the first official dialogue in more than a year. Seoul is gathering opinion from South Korean firms and plans to respond to the North Korean demand as early as this week.

Hyundai Asan, which has seen a dramatic reversal of fortune in the last year, has launched a new tourism project to make up some of its lost revenue.  Unable to offer trips to Kaesong and Kumgangsan, they are still trying to capitalize on the mystery of the DPRK:

Hyundai Asan said its new programme includes one-day tours costing 46,000 won (34 dollars) per person to border areas at Paju and Yeoncheon, north of Seoul.

Two-day tours to the border area at Yanggu, 175 kilometres northeast of Seoul, and to Mount Sorak on the east coast, will cost 118,000 won.

“Along with trips to front-line fences, tourists will be allowed to see wildlife and other places which remained untouched for decades,” a Hyundai Asan official told AFP.

Visitors will not be allowed inside the DMZ itself.

Hyundai Asan said the new programme would help ease its financial woes, which began when a South Korean woman tourist was shot dead when she strayed into a military zone at Kumgang last July.

The Seoul government halted tours to Kumgang after the shooting, while Pyongyang barred the one-day tours to Kaesong city as relations worsened.

The company’s other major joint project, the joint industrial complex near Kaesong city, is also facing problems due to sour cross-border ties.

The communist North has expelled hundreds of South Korean staff and restricted access to the Seoul-funded complex.

On March 30 it detained a Hyundai Asan employee for allegedly criticising the North’s regime and trying to persuade a local woman worker to defect.

Read the full stories below:
Gov’t warns it can bar S. Koreans from visiting N. Korea
Yonhap
4/26/2009

Inter-Korean trade drops 30 percent in March during political tension
Yonhap
4/27/2009

South Korean firm to start tours along North Korea border
Channel News Asia
4/27/2009

US Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) has introduced legislation which would require the the US governmet to add the DPRK back to its list of state sponsors of terror.  If passed by the legislature and signed by the president, this would reverse the decision by Republican President George W. Bush, who had the DPRK removed from the list in October of last year. 

The bill is S. 837.  It has been referred to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.  I am not a political insider, so I do not have any insight into how long it will remain there or if it has any chance of passing a committee vote.  Joshua will probably be following the bill closely will be actively seeking the bill’s passage, so we can expect updates at One Free Korea.

I cannot offer any analysis of the proposed legislation since the Government Printing Office has not yet published the bill’s text (so it is not on line at the moment). You can track the bill’s progress here.  Thomas has a list of cosponsors, etc.

UPDATE: Joshua has a link to a copy of the Senate bill as well as information on the corresponding House bill.

Lankov writes in the Financial Times:

The US and its allies have almost no leverage when it comes to dealing with North Korea. There is much talk about sanctions, but, to be effective, they must be upheld by all major states, and this is not going to happen. China and Russia, driven by their own agendas, have already made clear that they would not support a tougher approach. These two states have veto power in the Security Council, and are major trade partners of North Korea (slightly more than half of Pyongyang’s entire trade is with them).

The ineffectiveness of sanctions has been demonstrated before. In 2006 when Kim Jong-il’s regime conducted its first nuclear test, even China was outraged and supported UN sanctions. However, it soon became clear that the sanctions were not working, since not only China, but also the US chose to return to business as usual. As a result from 2006 the North Korean government, despite theoretically being subjected to sanctions, felt more secure domestically and internationally than at any time since the early 1990s. This time, however, even the chance of passing a resolution is slim.

What else can be done? Military actions are unthinkable. Unilateral economic pressure will not work since neither the US nor its major allies have significant trade with North Korea. Financial sanctions, imposed on the foreign banks serving the regime, would probably deliver a blow, but it is unlikely that this would lead to a serious crisis in Pyongyang.

Indeed, even if an efficient sanctions regime were imposed, its only victims would be common people in North Korea. In the late 1990s, about 5 per cent of the entire population starved to death, but there were no signs of discontent: terrified, isolated and unaware of any alternative to their system, North Korean farmers did not rebel, but died quietly.

This means that diplomatic condemnation will have no consequences, and North Korean dictators understand this. If anything, the excessive noise is harmful: the sharp contrast between bellicose statements and lack of real action will again demonstrate to North Korean leaders that their opponents are powerless.

However, there is something even worse than empty threats, and this is empty threats followed by generous concessions. If history is a guide, this is likely to happen. In 2002-06 the US took a very harsh approach to the North, but everything changed in October 2006 when North Korea conducted a partially successful nuclear test. In merely four months, US policy was dramatically reversed, negotiations were restarted, and aid delivery resumed. Perhaps this change of policy was wise in itself (isolation would not work anyway), but its timing was bad. It once again confirmed to North Koreans that blackmail works.

The recent launch confirmed they had learnt the lesson. Since the regime was afraid the US was not paying enough attention to it, it was deliberately provocative, in the hope that the US, after a short outburst of militant rhetoric, would rush back to the negotiating table ready to make more concessions. It might be right.

—

There is no alternative to negotiations with Mr Kim’s clique. But Pyongyang dictators should be taught that provocations do not pay (or, at least, do not pay handsomely and immediately). This is especially important now, when Mr Obama’s administration has its first encounter with North Korean brinkmanship.

Read the full article here:
Sanctions will have no effect on North Korea
Financial Times
Andrei Lankov
4/12/2009

UPDATE 2: Financial markets do not seem to care.  According to Reuters:

Financial markets in Seoul and Tokyo were not affected by North Korea’s announcement, with investors seeing it as more of the sabre-rattling they have come to expect from Pyongyang.

UPDATE 1: According to the Wall Street Journal, the DPRK has ordered nuclear inspectors to leave the country (again):

North Korea ordered International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors out of the country Tuesday. The decision ends international monitoring of a research reactor at Yongbyon and in theory could allow reprocessing of fuel rods to produce plutonium. The IAEA is expected to announce the eviction in the next hour.

The on-again, off-again inspections at the 5-megawatt Experimental Nuclear Reactor Plant and the Nuclear Fuel Fabrication Plant at Yongbyon resumed in October, soon after the U.S. announced it would remove North Korea from the State Department list of countries that sponsor terrorism.

The IAEA issued a press statement here. 

ORIGINAL POST:
The UN Security Council has published its presidential statement condemning th DPRK’s missile launch (read the full text of the statement here), and the media is widely reporting on the contents:

The United Nations Security Council has condemned North Korea’s April 5th rocket launch and demanded that Pyongyang not conduct further tests, saying that it would expand sanctions against North Korea.

—

The Security Council’s presidential statement is a level below a resolution — which has the power of force to back it up. But several ambassadors, including U.S. envoy Susan Rice, said the statement is legally binding, nonetheless. “The United States views presidential statements, broadly speaking, as binding. In this instance, it is more than binding in that it adds to an existing Chapter 7 sanctions regime. So in our view, there is no doubt that the measures that will be imposed as a consequence of this presidential statement by the 24th or 30th of April will occur and will be binding,” he said.

—

Monday’s statement goes further, saying there will be additional strengthening of measures in resolution 1718 and activates the dormant sanctions committee set up under that resolution.

“It is not extending the number of sanctions. It is not doing that. What it is doing is broadening the base of sanctions under the existing resolution. That is what we have agreed to do in principle and we have agreed to do it in a tight timeline by end of this month. So we are tightening the sanction screw a notch against North Korea,” said British Ambassador, John Sawers.

The statement calls for the designation of entities that would be subject to asset freezes and the prohibition of the transfer of some goods into or out of North Korea.

Turkish Ambassador Baki Ilkin, chairman of the sanction committee, said no countries have officially submitted their list yet. But several ambassadors said they are putting them together. (Voice of America)

This morning, the DPRK annonced it will withdrawl from 6 party talks:

Fuming at the U.N. Security Council for condemning its recent missile launch, North Korea said Tuesday it will restart its plutonium factory, junk all its disarmament agreements and “never participate” again in six-country nuclear negotiations.

It called the Security Council’s statement a “brigandish,” “wanton” and “unjust” infringement of its sovereignty. It said that six-party nuclear talks with the United States, South Korea, Japan, Russia and, even its closest ally, China, had “turned into a platform” for forcing the North to disarm itself and for bringing down its system of government.

“We have no choice but to further strengthen our nuclear deterrent to cope with additional military threats by hostile forces,” North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement released by its state news agency.

If it follows through on Tuesday’s bluster, North Korea will walk away from six years of slow, fitful but sometimes productive negotiations that have led to substantial disablement of the North’s main nuclear reactor and partial disclosure of the scale of its weapons program.

—

“We will actively consider building our own light-water nuclear reactor, will revive nuclear facilities and reprocess used nuclear fuel rods,” the ministry said. Experts have said the North does not have the equipment or skills to make an advanced light-water reactor.

China, host of the six-party talks, called for restraint and calm on Tuesday, asking all countries to return to the discussions, even after North Korea announced it would never do so.

“We hope the relevant parties could proceed from the perspective of the overall interest of the region, so as to work together to safeguard the progress of the six-party talks,” Chinese foreign ministry’s spokeswoman Jiang Yu said at a news briefing.

Japan also urged North Korea to return to the talks and the Russia government said it regretted Pyongyang’s decision.

—

Analysts in Seoul said that North Korea, with its threat to pull out of the six-party talks, appeared to be up to its familiar tactics of brinkmanship — creating a crisis in order to be rewarded for helping to solve it.

“North Korea can use today’s walkout as a negotiating chip with the United States in the future,” said Koh Yu-whan, a profession of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul.

“North Koreans have learned from past experience that when they create worst-case scenarios they get closer to solving their problems,” said Chun Hyun-joon, a North Korea specialist at the Korea Institute for National Unification. (Washington Post)

Here is the full KCNA comment:

DPRK Foreign Ministry Vehemently Refutes UNSC’s “Presidential Statement”
 
Pyongyang, April 14 (KCNA) — The DPRK Foreign Ministry issued a statement Tuesday flatly rejecting the brigandish “presidential statement” which the U.S. and its followers finally released by abusing the UNSC to condemn the DPRK’s launch of satellite for peaceful purposes.

Saying that throughout history the UNSC has never taken issue with satellite launches, the statement continues:

First, the DPRK resolutely rejects the unjust action taken by the UNSC wantonly infringing upon the sovereignty of the DPRK and seriously hurting the dignity of the Korean people.

Second, there would be no need to hold six-party talks which the DPRK has attended.

Now that the six-party talks have turned into a platform for infringing upon the sovereignty of the DPRK and seeking to force the DPRK to disarm itself and bring down the system in it the DPRK will never participate in the talks any longer nor it will be bound to any agreement of the six-party talks.

Third, the DPRK will bolster its nuclear deterrent for self-defence in every way.

It will take the measure for restoring to their original state the nuclear facilities which had been disabled under the agreement of the six-party talks and putting their operation on a normal track and fully reprocess the spent fuel rods churned out from the pilot atomic power plant as part of it.  

Read the full stories here:
North Korea orders UN nuclear inspectors to leave
Reuters
Jon Herskovitz
4/14/2009
North Korea Expels Nuclear Inspectors After Leaving Six-Party Talks
Wall Street Journal
David Crawford, Evan Ramstad
4/14/2009

Security Council condemns DPR Korea’s recent launch
UN Security Council Press Release
4/13/2009

UN Condemns North Korea Rocket Launch 
Voice of America
Margaret Besheer
4/13/2009

N. Korea Says It Will Boycott Nuclear Talks, Restart Weapons Plant
Washington Post
Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
4/14/2009

From the National Comittee on North Korea:

On April 10, 2009 the Japanese government renewed sanctions on the DPRK that were set to expire on April 13. The sanctions, first implemented in 2006, ban entry into Japanese ports of all North Korean flagged vessels and charted flights between Japan and the DPRK, as well as ban, in principle, visits by Japanese government officials to the DPRK and visits by DPRK government officials to Japan. The sanctions also ban all DPRK imports and payments for imports from the DPRK. The 2006 sanctions, initially implemented for six months and renewed for six month periods thereafter, were renewed for a full year on April 10.

The Japanese government also instituted stricter reporting requirements on the amount of funds people in Japan can remit or transfer to the DPRK. The new regulations reduce the amount of funds that can be transferred undeclared to the DPRK from 30 million yen (US$298,000) to 10 million yen ($99,000). In addition, travelers can bring only 300,000 yen cash ($2,990) to the DPRK without reporting it; this is down from a previous limit of over a million yen.

Although the new reporting requirement has been called a “new sanction,” it does not seem to be a genuine sanction since it does not limit remittances to the DPRK. According to Xinhua, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Takeo Kawamura told reporters, “The measure is aimed at getting a clearer picture of fund flows to North Korea (DPRK).” He also said that the move is “appropriate giving consideration to the unsettled abduction issue.”

Japan considered but rejected a ban on all exports to the DPRK. Newspapers report that the Japanese government thought such a ban would have little impact.

And according to Bloomberg:

Trade between Japan and North Korea fell 97 percent to 793 million yen in 2008 — all in Japanese exports — from 21.4 billion yen in 2005, according to Japan’s Finance Ministry.

You can read the full Bloomberg story here:
Japan Imposes New North Korea Sanctions After Missile Launch
Bloomberg
Takashi Hirokawa and Toko Sekiguchi
4/10/2009