North Korea—Economic System
North Korea occupies about 55 percent of the total land area of the Korean Peninsula—about 123,000 square kilometers. Only 20 percent of North Korea's land is arable, however, and a generally harsh climate restricts the production of arable farming to one crop per year. Most farms are cooperatively owned by each village cooperative unit and small, with an average size of under 2 hectares in the late 1990s. As a result of a sizable loss in population resulting from the Korean War (1950–1953) and from migration to the South, combined with a low fertility rate, North Korea has been a relatively labor-scarce economy; the current population is estimated at around 22 million. The maintenance of a large armed force (with more than 1 million members) has exacerbated the shortage of civilian labor. As a result, the armed forces have frequently been mobilized for work on civilian projects. The labor force in 2000 was estimated at 13 million, of whom some 30 percent were employed in primary industry.
Central Planning
Since the establishment of the North Korean state in 1948, its economic policy has been grounded principally on Karl Marx's hypothesis that the structure of social relations in the economic subsystem exerts a powerful influence upon the subsystems of law, opinion, politics, and ideology.
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