THE PARADOX OF THE NORTH KOREAN FINANCIAL POSITION

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) emerges in 2003 in a most unenviable position. The North Korean Constitution steadfastly upholds the Socialist ideology, but as North Korea moves faster and closer to the implementation of this doctrine, it becomes increasingly dependent upon foreign capital investment and technology. This has forced North Korea to increasingly break from the Marxist-Leninist constraint and to develop and modify some thirty-jive new laws to calm the wary foreign investor. Now the Foreign Trade Act of February 2001, and the Enforcement Decree of the Foreign Investment Protection Act of December 2001, widens the cracks in the heretofore-concrete socialist Constitutional faith.