North Korea Drastically Increases Taxes

No, they’re not “officially” taxes; they’re merely mandatory payments the state collects from citizens. Whatever nomenclature you choose, North Korea is sharply increasing them, having already raised prices dramatically in the course of what it has euphemistically dubbed “economic reform.” In actuality, North Korea is a society with deep state-imposed class divisions, which means that the poor inevitably do most of the starving and dying when the state changes its systems for the collection and distribution of capital. This Amnesty International report (summarized in this Asia Times story) details how that’s manifested in the regime’s highly discriminatory distribution of food.

Does this mean that workers at Kaesong may receive considerably less than the promised $58 a month in wages, a sum that already represents just 3% of what unionized workers earn in South Korea?

Call that reform if you must, but it’s certainly not liberalization or a portent thereof.