I have always found Andrei Lankov’s writing very informative and insightful and his latest in the Korea Times about the North Korean black market is no different:

The North Korea of the 1960s or 1980s was not a society of complete equality. It had its rich and poor. But the affluent people were affluent either because the party-state bureaucracy chose them, such as government officials and a handful of the most prominent scholars and writers, as well as people who were allowed to work overseas and were paid in hard currency, or allowed them to be affluent. For example, this was the case with the repatriates from Japan. From the late 1980s, the situation changed. Some people began to make money not because they were paid and showered with privileges, but because they learned how to use market capitalism.

The markets began to grow explosively around 1990, and North Korean “black capitalism’’ was conceived around this time. The first really rich people began to appear, even though they had to hide their success both from the authorities and their fellow countrymen. And one had to use whatever advantages one had, as competition was tough. In the late 1990s, the North Koreans used to say “there are only three types of people in North Korea: those who starve, those who beg and those who trade.’’

The breakdown of the economy in North Korea also had the side effect of empowering women:

When economic disaster struck, this arrangement had unintended consequences. The men kept going to their factories and offices, even if their wages were becoming meaningless. They were afraid of the still formidable state machine, they wanted to keep the status traditionally associated with proper jobs and they also needed the rations _ as long as the rations were forthcoming. Women, especially housewives, were free to pursue completely different economic strategies. They took up market commerce with great enthusiasm and soon comprised a majority of North Korean vendors. This also meant that the women’s earnings became the major source of income in many Korean families.

This is an interesting article as always from Lankov worth checking out.