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The experience of the failed Communist market doctrines seemed to have led at least tacitly, to approving the evolutionary process of the new emerging Jangmadang markets that have been growing rapidly and spreading around the country, North Korea. The Jangmadang retail-evolution that was germinated in the 1990s is now one of the major channels of distribution and has become a critical value chain that can move the hungry North Korean consumers out of poverty because it also can lead the country's economy to potential prosperity as their Southern families (South Korea) had achieved decades ago. Two market structures; one prior to and another since the 1990s are presented and discussed.
THE SEVEN DECADES OF SECLUSION
Countering stereotypes of the country as starving, backward, and relentlessly bleak in recent months North Korea has been promoting to attract tourists around the world predicting as many as 2 million by 2020 (Talmadge 2015). However, with its roguish policy and a limited number of allies for the last seven decades, few people have been allowed to step into the country for research of any subject. The control of information flow out of the country by the state has been almost impeccable. This situation creates various obstacles in studying North Korea for any subjects. No wonder North Korea is branded as one of the most mysterious nation states on earth (Yonsei Institute of North Korean Studies, 2015). The study of the changing market system of North Korea is not an exception for securing any necessary data and information. There is no alternative but relying on two avenues; one is to be dependent on the secondary information already published somewhere, and the other is to interview defectors of North Korea currently residing outside the country. The information barriers cast a caveat, if a reliable and accurate portrait of North Korea has ever been presented.
The birth of the North Korean market system traces back to August 1945, seven decades ago, when the Japanese invaders were being forced out of Korea at the end of World War II and the Korean communist leaders, supported by the Soviet Union, began to section the peninsula by a demarcation line called the 38th parallel drawn by U.S. official Dean Rusk with the surprising acceptance...