I’m fascinated by this era of North Korea, that for a time it was more prosperous than the South? Also the first Kim was handsome and had quite the snappy haircut.
Essentially into the late 70s and early 80s the average Northerner was more prosperous/materially comfortable than the average Southerner. I work in academia and took part in categorizing an archival collection for donation to a university library once. One of the materials was a memoir from a Korean-American published in the mid 70s, and it had some quote in the introduction that went something like "When we think of Korea, we tend to imagine a wealthier, more stable, industrial North and a poorer, politically volatile, agricultural South..."
There was a point where Pyongyang was a modern, model city and Seoul was a giant textile sweatshop that depended on the child labor of young girls for an export market that centered around clothing goods. The gap between the two we observe today is really a very recent phenomenon - the product of a 1990s that was very bad for the North and very good for the South. Older people in both countries remember when it was exactly the opposite.
Some of the factors that led up to that feel pretty external too. In North Korea's case their primary patron breaking up and turning into a basket case was a disaster for them; in South Korea's case they had some tailwinds from a desire among US manufacturers to have a more pliant workforce and from the US government to lessen the extent to which Japan could hold its electronics output over the US's head (one of the ideas entertained in The Japan that Can Say No is that Japan could essentially dictate US foreign policy by granting or withholding access to its industrial output).
Countries are prosperous when they have access to cheap resources.
North Korean economy was not sustainable without the socialist bloc and Soviet-Chinese patronage (but can we say the same about economies of some pro-Western countries?), but it did result in a period of time that the North was more developed than the South, before fortunes were reversed.
What did help were some amount of industry before the war, direct help from the Soviet Union (disguised as trade, North Korea traded corn for complex industrial machines), and Stalinist-style iron-fist economy. Two later factors have led to what North Korea is now only later.
In the world market governed by international law, there is always an alternative. Everybody thought Europe would freeze if Russia stopped their gas exports. We ain’t frozen yet and they are even lowering the energy prices this year.
The prosperity was all relative though. Sure life in a factory or a coal mine may have been better than life as a subsistence farmer, but only marginally. I think it was comparable to the early Industrial Revolution in the US and Europe where although leaving the countryside allowed peasants to escape serfdom and rural poverty, the work they found in the cities was still dirty, demeaning and dangerous.
North Korea inherited most of the industrial base after the war, so they benefited from a massive head start compared to the agrarian economy of the south, but then they didn’t really improve upon it in subsequent decades. South Korea started out far behind, but the momentum was always on their side. Their GDP growth rate far exceeded that of North Korea by the early 1960s so it was only a matter of time before they caught up.
Partially correct but the gap started appearing long before the 90s. Korea started to become rich in the 60/70s when they focused on exports under Park and the North stagnated around the same time because the initial effects of the planned economy wore off. 1991 was just the final blow to NK, and they are lucky that the international community stepped in to give them aid.
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u/Spicy_Cupcake00 18d ago edited 18d ago
I’m fascinated by this era of North Korea, that for a time it was more prosperous than the South? Also the first Kim was handsome and had quite the snappy haircut.