Capita Income: Korea and Cho Tae-Hyoung

capita income: Their best guess is that North Korea's gross domestic product contracted 3.5 percent in 2017 to about 32.3 billion 40 times smaller than the South's GDP. Annual per capita income in North Korea is about 1,300, according to the BOK, less than a twentieth that of the South and about half the level of Vietnam, where Kim will travel later this month for a summit with Donald Trump, according to The Japan Times. Figures for 2018 won't be available until midyear but the outlook isn't encouraging, according to Cho, who spoke in an interview on Feb. 13. That is the message from Cho Tae-hyoung, the chief of the North Korea research team at South Korea's central bank in Seoul, which is considered the most authoritative source for estimates on Kim Jong Un's economy. ; Cho and his colleagues at the Bank of Korea draw on a grab-bag of hard data, suppositions and guesswork that would bring despair to economists studying most countries. He cited the impact of sanctions that cut exports to China by about 90 percent in 2018. Satellite images indicate that more markets are popping up around the country every year, and that they are getting bigger. With official statistics from North Korea both scant and suspect, the BOK combs through figures compiled by South Korean government departments and its spy agency, analysis of satellite images, debriefings from defectors, reports from think tanks, Chinese trade data, and with great caution speeches by Kim and state media out of Pyongyang. (news.financializer.com). As reported in the news.