North Korea's policy on marketplaces has swung between suppression and accommodation, but the regime has seldom cracked down on markets with the intention of permanently closing them down, a U.S. researcher said.
  

Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein, a non-resident Kelly fellow at the Pacific Forum CSIS, said he reached the assessment after analyzing satellite photos taken of a dozen major cities in North Korea since the early 2000s.
  

"Government repression of the markets usually does not translate into less space for market activity. In other words, during periods when the North Korean government has cracked down on the markets, like 2009-2010, markets generally have not permanently closed on any noticeable scale," Silberstein said.
  

"North Korea seldom adopted policies of market repression with the intention of closing down the markets for the long term," he said in an article on 38 North, a website run by the U.S.-Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
  

Since the early 2000s, the North's markets have seen overall growth, Silberstein said. While growth has been only marginal in some cities, other cities like the border city of Sinuiju have seen markets grow by over 110 percent between 2003 and 2014, he said.
  

In a number of instances, the complete elimination of local markets might not have been the intention of North Korean authorities, he said, adding that the regime could have wanted to remove certain types of traders, such as particularly wealthy ones, without doing away with the market system entirely.
  

"The rise of markets is perhaps the most crucial institutional change that has occurred in the North Korean economy since central planning broke down in the 1990s," the expert said. "Though marketplaces first arose as an illegal phenomenon outside the country's official economy, the state gradually formalized and regulated certain sites and incorporated them into the official economic system."
  

Silberstein said the widespread perception that market activity in the North would be most prolific near the border with China is wrong, pointing out that the city with the largest aggregate market space per capita is the western port city of Nampo, followed by Haeju in South Hwanghae province.
  

The main reason for such southern cities having greater market space is because farming is more  prolific in the region and growers there may have more agricultural produce from farms and kitchen gardens to sell at markets, he said. (Yonhap)