Growth despite Sanctions? Revisiting the Effect of North Korea Sanctions

Abstract

Recently the central bank of Korea, the Bank of Korea, announced that North Korea's GDP in 2016 increased by 3.9%p compared with the pre-vious year. In 2016, the UN passed two resolutions for strong economic sanctions on North Korea, UNSCR 2270 and 2321. This economic per-formance, therefore, seems to support and even prove the popular hy-pothesis among North Korean experts that sanctions against North Ko-rea are useless. This article deals with this recent phenomenon of "growth despite sanction" in North Korea.