Recently the central bank of Korea, the Bank of Korea, announced that North Koreas GDP in 2016 increased by 3.9%p compared with the previous year. In 2016, the UN passed two resolutions for strong economic sanctions on North Korea. This economic performance, therefore, seems to support the popular hypothesis that sanctions against North Korea are useless. This article deals with this recent phenomenon of "growth despite sanction" in North Korea.
This short article consists of two parts, the first part of which analyzes the internal driving forces of recent economic growth, which has not drawn much attention yet. And then we will provide an explanation for why previous sanctions on North Korea have failed to generate sufficient effect, why the United Nations Security Council Resolutions 2321 and 2371 are different from previous ones, what the potential effect of recent sanctions will be, and when this will materialize.