North Korea’s Economic Development and Cosmetic Industry Outlook

The North Korean economy has been a statistical black hole for decades but is undergoing substantial transformations. Rapid postwar industrialization was not sustained beyond the mid-1980s and South Korea’s economy far outpaced North Korea’s during the next three decades, during which trend growth declined and turned negative as Soviet support ended and the terms of trade with China became less friendly (Robinson in Monthly Review 16: 20–31, 1965).