Is North Korea's economy really booming? Inside the debate over the DPRK's growth story

North Korea is emerging as the success story of the decade, even Western corporate media like the New York Times and the Washington Journal are acknowledging it. Gleaming apartment towers rise across a new district of the capital. Smartphones are increasingly common. Electric vehicles cruise streets that were largely empty a decade ago. But they are keeping up with their narrative of vilifying the nation and its leadership. They point to its trade relations with Russia and China as the sole reason for the growth story. Specifically attributing the arms and armies export to Russia and reducing the whole growth story to the humanitarian crisis due to the Ukraine war. Along with Russia, China and Iran, North Korea has completed the axis that is standing against the Western neo-colonial unfair trade system. A closer look beneath the headlines reveals a more complicated picture than either Western critics or the DPRK supporters acknowledge.

Pyongyang has not released official national economic statistics, GDP, growth rates, inflation, or trade figures to the public or to international bodies since the 1960s as part of its deliberate policy choice, but not as an administrative gap. The North Korean economic data is from South Korea or mirror trade data from China's customs, or its other trade partners or from Western intelligence using satellite to detect nightlights, port activity and construction speed. It creates an epistemic problem that neither the Western media nor the DPRK supporters acknowledge. According to estimates from South Korea's Korea Development Institute, North Korea's economy grew by approximately 3.1 per cent in 2023 and 3.7 per cent in 2024, its fastest pace in nearly a decade. The arms exports to Russia are worth an estimated $10 billion since 2023, expanded trade with China, and a construction boom concentrated in Pyongyang and select urban centres, as perceived by satellite images.

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The DPRK government has an ambitious program targeting 20 rural counties annually over a decade, resulting in over 113,000 new homes across rural communities, new greenhouse farming complexes, and new factories. Defenders of the program point to it as evidence that North Korea's centrally planned system can direct windfalls toward broad national development rather than private profit, a contrast they draw with many Global South nations that have failed to translate resource wealth into widespread development.

"The DPRK's development is different," argued Ju Hian Park, director of engagement at Breakthrough News and a recent visitor to Pyongyang. "It's not just happening in pursuit of the profits of particular companies."

There is a persistent gap between the Western media's portrayal and the on-the-ground reality. Evaluating North Korea objectively is genuinely difficult. The DPRK government tightly controls information flows. Defector testimony, while valuable, represents a self-selected group. Satellite data and market price monitoring provide partial windows. The image of North Korea as a country in perpetual famine, rooted in the catastrophic "Arduous March" period of the mid-to-late 1990s, when floods and the collapse of Soviet support caused widespread starvation, has proved remarkably durable in Western coverage despite being three decades out of date. Agricultural output, food availability, and basic infrastructure have all recovered substantially since that period, a recovery that received almost no coverage in mainstream outlets until the current boom became too visible to ignore.