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A Review of North Korea’s Major Trading Partners and Items
Investigating major trading partners and items with North Korea is informative in terms that it can predict the path through which North Korea’s strategic items will transfer to non-nuclear-weapon states when North Korea denuclearizes. By analyzing North Korea’s trading partners and the items, it is possible to identify the relevant countries through which items arrive from the first importing country to the end-user in the process of exporting items and to predict the way how North Korea disguise or conceal their strategic items among general items during normal export procedures. As of 2020, North Korea’s major trading partners are China, Russia, Vietnam, India, Nigeria, and Switzerland. Compared to 2019, Mozambique, Tanzania, Ghana, and Thailand entered the top 10, while Brazil, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and South Africa pushed out of the top 10. North Korea’s trade dependence on China accounts for 88.2%, making it the largest trading partner for years, and it shows that North Korea is mainly conducting trade with Asian and African countries. North Korea’s most important export items are mineral products (HS 25-27) and steel & metal products (HS 72-83) and the most significant import items are mineral products (HS 25-27) and oils & fats & prepared foods (HS 15-24). In 2017, due to UN Security Council sanctions for North Korea’s international ballistic missile (ICBM) test-fire, North Korea’s exports from 3 billion dollars fell by 90% to less than 300 million dollars. This is the result of most of North Korea’s major export items included in the export ban, and changes have occurred in its export items. In 2020, export fell to less than 100 million dollars due to border lockdown measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19, which also affected the change of North Korea’s major export items. Although North Korea does not officially publish its foreign trade statistics, in order to review North Korea’s trade information, KOTRA statistics are utilized. KOTRA statistics provide only two digits of HS code number, so it is challenging to identify detailed item classification. Moreover, these statistics are based on the export amount, so it is difficult to determine the exact quantity of export items. It is expected that information on North Korean trading partners and items will be used to predict potential transferable export methods of North Korea’s strategic items when North Korea denuclearizes.
