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North Korea seeks German economic advice

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is looking to Germany for advice on how to attract international investment to his isolated dictatorship in 2013, a newspaper reported on Saturday.

Published: 5 January 2013 10:55 CET

North Korea seeks German economic advice

Photo: DPA

The secretive Communist dictatorship of North Korea is planning to open up its economy for foreign investment this year – with the help of German business experts and lawyers, according to a report in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

“There’s a master plan,” one unnamed German business expert and university lecturer told the paper. “They want to open up this year.”

The report says a team of German lawyers and economic experts are involved in concrete plans to alter North Korean law to welcome investors into the country, which has been isolated from the global community since the Second World War.

In his New Year address Kim Jong Un announced radical changes intended to transform the backward nation into an “economic giant” and raise living standards for the North Korean population, which frequently suffers severe food shortages and power outages.

The strategy is likely to be based on the Vietnamese model of selecting individual businesses to invest in the country, the expert told the paper, rather than the Chinese model of targeting specific economic zones for foreign investment.

The news that German advice is being sought in Pyongyang comes amid a row in the US over plans recently announced by Google’s Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt to visit North Korea on what he claims is a private trip.

DPA/The Local/jlb

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How is Denmark's economy handling inflation and rate rises?

The council, led by four university economics professors commonly referred to as “the wise men” or vismænd in Denmark, gave a much rosier picture of Denmark’s economy in its spring report, published on Tuesday, than it did in its autumn report last year.

“We, like many others, are surprised by how employment continues to rise despite inflation and higher interest rates,” the chair or ‘chief wise man’, Carl-Johan Dalgaard, said in a press release.

“A significant drop in energy prices and a very positive development in exports mean that things have gone better than feared, and as it looks now, the slowdown will therefore be more subdued than we estimated in the autumn.”

In the English summary of its report, the council noted that in the autumn, market expectations were that energy prices would remain at a high level, with “a real concern for energy supply shortages in the winter of 2022/23”.

That the slowdown has been more subdued, it continued was largely due to a significant drop in energy prices compared to the levels seen in late summer 2022, and compared to the market expectations for 2023.

The council now expects Denmark’s GDP growth to slow to 1 percent in 2023 rather than for the economy to shrink by 0.2 percent, as it predicted in the autumn.

In 2024, it expects the growth rate to remain the same as in 2003, with another year of 1 percent GDP growth. In its autumn report it expected weaker growth of 0.6 percent in 2024.

What is the outlook for employment?

In the autumn, the expert group estimated that employment in Denmark would decrease by 100,000 people towards the end of the 2023, with employment in 2024 about 1 percent below the estimated structural level.

Now, instead, it expects employment will fall by just 50,000 people by 2025.

What does the expert group’s outlook mean for interest rates and government spending?

Denmark’s finance minister Nikolai Wammen came in for some gentle criticism, with the experts judging that “the 2023 Finance Act, which was adopted in May, should have been tighter”. The current government’s fiscal policy, it concludes “has not contributed to countering domestic inflationary pressures”.

The experts expect inflation to stay above 2 percent in 2023 and 2024 and not to fall below 2 percent until 2025.

If the government decides to follow the council’s advice, the budget in 2024 will have to be at least as tight, if not tighter than that of 2023.

“Fiscal policy in 2024 should not contribute to increasing demand pressure, rather the opposite,” they write.

The council also questioned the evidence justifying abolishing the Great Prayer Day holiday, which Denmark’s government has claimed will permanently increase the labour supply by 8,500 full time workers.

“The council assumes that the abolition of Great Prayer Day will have a short-term positive effect on the labour supply, while there is no evidence of a long-term effect.”

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