North Korea: Suffering under sanctions?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 8 January 2020
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How does North Korea raise foreign currency, and are the toughest economic sanctions in the world actually having any effect?
Ed Butler looks at one of the country's major sources of income - migrant workers. According to Artyom Lukin, professor of international relations at Russia's Far Eastern Federal University, the workers who used to frequent his hometown of Vladivostok have been shooed away by the Russian authorities.
But analyst Lee Sang Hyun of South Korea's Sejong Institute is sceptical that the Chinese are clamping down heavily on Pyongyang, while Ian Bremmer of US think tank the Eurasia Group says the American government has little to show for the pressure it has been applying.
(Picture: North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un; Credit: Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:06.0 | Today, putting the squeeze on North Korea by sanctioning their foreign migrant workforce. |
| 0:11.5 | Are the workers going home, though? |
| 0:13.5 | It's very hard to trace how many of them are still there, but we still believe that there are quite a number of North Korean workers in China. |
| 0:22.9 | We assess the impact of economic sanctions on the world's most secretive communist state |
| 0:27.7 | and ask, what's the evidence North Korea's president is feeling the squeeze? |
| 0:32.2 | If you're Kim Jong-un, you have to feel pretty good about so far your record internationally since he's been in power. |
| 0:40.3 | That's all to come in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:45.4 | Where exactly does North Korea get its money? |
| 0:49.6 | It's a question we're asking today, and it was on my mind a few years ago |
| 0:53.4 | when I walked into a |
| 0:54.4 | restaurant called Pyongyang in another part of East Asia, Cambodia. |
| 1:02.3 | On the menu, we have, well, a range of delicacies, pine nut gruel, dog meat casserole, spicy fried frogs, steamed Korean pork intestine. |
| 1:18.3 | I'm sure they're all delicious, but I think I'm going to go for the stir-fried rice. |
| 1:25.4 | Oh, the lights are going down. |
| 1:28.3 | I think we're about to have a show. |
| 1:37.4 | Little had prepared me for the slightly bizarre but clearly virtuoso performances that I then |
| 1:42.9 | witnessed, beginning with this tap dance routine |
| 1:45.4 | involving spinning waitresses balancing heavy-looking water jars on their heads. |
| 1:51.2 | Well, that was some kind of traditional peasant dance. |
| 1:54.8 | It all made me wonder what exactly is the objective of these state-run restaurants. |
| 1:59.4 | I turn for answers to Michael Madden, author of the |
... |
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