North Korea touts 2022 economic achievement despite challenges, increase in defence spending

North Korea touted unspecified economic achievement in 2022 despite unprecedented challenges including the Covid-19 pandemic during a recent session of its top legislature, which leader Kim Jong-un did not attend, according to state-run media reports on Thursday.

In a report to the two-day Supreme People’s Assembly session, which began on Wednesday, Premier Kim Tok Hun said North Korean people “achieved remarkable successes in the struggle for economic construction” by overcoming “all sorts of unprecedented challenges and threats”, the official Korean Central News Agency said.

The premier, however, did not elaborate on the economic achievement and said the Cabinet revealed “not a few shortcomings” in last year’s struggle to implement the decisions of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea. Those shortcomings were not specified.

The North’s economy has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, natural disasters and international economic sanctions designed to thwart Pyongyang’s nuclear and ballistic missile ambitions.

The assembly session approved state budget implementation for 2022 and expenditures for this year, with 15.9 per cent of the total spent last year on “further bolstering up the war deterrence”, KCNA said. The percentage of defence spending in the 2023 budget remains the same, according to the report.

The total state outlays will increase 1.7 per cent in 2023 compared with the previous year. Investment in economic construction will grow 1.2 per cent this year so that it will amount to 45 per cent of total expenditure, the news agency said, without mentioning the actual size of the budget.