Where Does North Korea’s Economy Stand Now?

Time has an interesting analysis.  The short-term picture has improved, though perhaps not sustainably:

Estimates from South Korea’s central bank, released on Monday, suggest that North Korea’s gross domestic product recovered in 2008 after two years of contraction, with 3.7% growth. The bank attributed the increase to “one-off factors,” such as an improved harvest.  [Time, Michael Schuman]

Still, I have to wonder if the regime would be clamping down on private trade if it was truly pinched for cash:

Marcus Noland, an expert on the North Korean economy at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, believes that efforts to roll back reform have intensified in the past six months, symbolized by the return of mass-mobilization development strategies that echo the regime’s policies of the 1950s. “The whole country and all the people,” Kim Jong Il was quoted saying in a January editorial, “should launch a general offensive dynamically, sounding the advance for opening the gate to a great, prosperous and powerful nation.”

It will be interesting to see how the new administration’s sanctions team affects this picture by next year.  Read the whole thing.