North Korea has been hailed as “the world’s most surprising economic success story” by the leading US financial daily, The Wall Street Journal.Despite being tightly controlled, technologically backward, and subject to crippling Western trade embargoes, the country has recorded year-on-year GDP growth of more than 3%, which many advanced economies could only dream of. Their unlikely success story has been “aided by arms sales and troop deployments to Russia” to fuel the Ukraine war, support from China, and “the ability to flout international sanctions to import more energy, components and materials”.
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