North Korea

Economic scale

North Korea is outside the Penn World Table’s 185-economy coverage (mostly small territories and micro-states), so no population or GDP-scale series is available here.

Source: Penn World Table 11.0 (Feenstra, Inklaar and Timmer 2015). License: CC BY 4.0. Methodology

No banking, currency, or sovereign-debt crisis is recorded for North Korea in the five chronologies (Global Macro Database, Reinhart-Rogoff, Laeven-Valencia, JST, ECB/ESRB).

Source: Global Macro Database 2026_06 | Reinhart-Rogoff (HBS BFFS) | Laeven & Valencia (2020, 2026) | Jordà-Schularick-Taylor Macrohistory Database | ECB/ESRB Financial Crises Database. License: non-commercial research (inherits GMD / JST); cite all five chronologies. Methodology

Financial depth and soundness

North Korea has no World Bank GFDD financial-structure series.

Source: World Bank Global Financial Development Database (Sep 2022). License: CC BY 4.0. Values end 2021 (GFDD's last release year). Methodology

Financial inclusion

North Korea is not surveyed in the World Bank Global Findex (162 economies covered), so no financial-inclusion series is available here.

Source: World Bank Global Findex Database 2025. License: CC BY 4.0. Survey waves; percent of adults age 15+. Methodology

Credit cycle

North Korea is not in the BIS credit-statistics reporting set, so no credit-to-GDP gap, debt-service ratio, or property-price series is available here.

Source: BIS credit and debt-service statistics | BIS residential property prices. License: free with "Source: BIS" attribution. Methodology

Policy, shadow and exchange rates

North Korea is in none of the BIS central-bank policy-rate set (48 economies), the Krippner shadow short rate set, or the BIS real broad effective-exchange-rate set (63 economies), so no monetary-stance or exchange-rate series is available here.

Source: BIS central bank policy rates | BIS effective exchange rates | Krippner shadow short rate estimates (LJK Limited). License: BIS series are free with "Source: BIS" attribution; Krippner shadow-rate estimates are cited as model estimates from LJK Limited and are not republished as bulk data. Methodology

External accounts

No IMF balance-of-payments, reserve, capital-account-openness, or remittance series is available for North Korea.

How concentrated North Korea’s income and wealth are. Top shares come from WID.world on equal-split adults (each adult in a couple assigned half the couple’s total); income (a flow) and wealth (a stock) are shown as distinct measures and never combined into one figure. The Gini coefficients are survey-based, on a 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (maximal concentration) scale: the World Bank PIP survey Gini and, where covered, the OECD disposable-income (post-tax, post-transfer) Gini. Each reading shows its year and, where a cross-country distribution exists, where North Korea sits among reporting economies. WID extends its most recent years by extrapolation, so a latest reading is an estimate.

Source: WID.world (World Inequality Database) | World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform | OECD Income Distribution Database. License: WID.world and OECD IDD: display-with-attribution (owner no-redistribution ruling); World Bank PIP: CC BY 4.0. Top shares on equal-split adults; recent WID years are extrapolated. Ginis are survey-based and measure a different object from the fiscal top shares. Methodology

No IMF sovereign-debt series is available for North Korea.

Source: IMF Global Debt Database | IMF World Economic Outlook. License: IMF, free with "Source: IMF" attribution. Methodology

Source: FATF, High-Risk and Other Monitored Jurisdictions (19 June 2026). License: FATF copyright; membership reproduced with attribution. Methodology

Reading this profile

• This page composes existing FinObservatory layers; it introduces no new data. Every figure is reproducible from the source cited in its section. See the methodology for the composition and each source’s coverage and staleness.
• The peer line on a card (“N economies report; median…”) places this country’s latest reading among every reporting economy’s own latest reading for the same indicator, under the same filters. Latest years differ where reporting lags. It is a descriptive position (a count and a median), not a score; for indicators where lower is safer, such as nonperforming loans, a high position is not a good one.
• The layers stop at different dates: the World Bank GFDD depth and soundness series end 2021 and the IMF Financial Development Index ends 2020, but the IMF FSI soundness panel is current (annual through 2024–2025 where reported); the Global Findex inclusion series are surveyed in waves and reach 2024; IMF debt runs to 2024; the Penn World Table runs 1950–2023; and the BIS statistics are the most current (credit through 2025, residential property to 2026Q1, and the policy rate and effective exchange rate into 2026 where reported). Krippner's month-end shadow short rate estimates, where this page has them, run 1995-01-31 to 2026-06-30 and are model estimates rather than observed policy rates. The external accounts reach 2025 (IMF balance-of-payments and reserves), 2024 (remittance inflows) and 2023 (capital-account openness). A quiet recent tail in one section can simply be where that source stops.
• Where a source has no reading for North Korea, the section says so in words instead of drawing a chart. A stated absence means the underlying dataset does not cover this country, not that the value is zero.