• International Area Studies Review
• /
• v.21 no.4
• /
• pp.141-158
• /
• 2017

The purpose of this study is to firstly estimate the inflation rate of North Korea using relative purchasing power parity. Most of the existing studies use North Korean rice prices as proxy to explain changes in North Korean prices. In this study, North Korea's price was estimated by applying purchasing power parity, which was used to estimate the price of socialist countries in the past, to North Korea. Second, it analyzes the impact of North Korea's price inflation after the institutional change of currency reform. We looked at the movements of North Korean prices after the institutional change of currency reform and compared it with the post-monetary reform of other socialist countries. We examine the impact of currency reform on North Korea, focusing on the price. As a result, after the currency reform in 2009, North Korea experienced hyperinflation. The North Korean inflation rate in the model was 3,010.0% in 2010, 195.0% in 2011, 68.0% in 2012 and 48.3% in 2013. After the currency reform of North Korea, the inflation rate is much higher than the socialist countries such as China and Vietnam who had experienced currency reform before. North Korea's monetary reforms are considered to have failed because of the side effects of hyperinflation.

• East Asian Economic Review
• /
• v.21 no.3
• /
• pp.201-230
• /
• 2017

This paper studies the long-run behavior of relative price dispersion among cities in Korea with a special emphasis on heterogeneous transitional patterns of price level dynamics. Formal statistical tests indicate considerable evidence for rejecting the null of relative price level convergence among the majority of cities over the sample period of 1985-2015. The analysis of gravity model suggests that the effect of transportation costs on intercity price level differentials is limited, while other socioeconomic factors, such as income, input factor prices, demographic structure, and housing price growth, play key roles in accounting for persistent regional price level disparities. Individual price levels are found to be better explained by a multiple-component model, and the deviations from PPP may be attributed to distinct stochastic common trends that are characterized by income and demographic structure.