Three years into the pandemic, Choson Exchange thrives with online programmes in North Korea
North Korea recently released new promotional materials marking its vision for Rajin Sonbong in the northwestern part of the country. According to the Chosun Ilbo article, President Kim Il-Sung previously said: "Rajin-Sonbong must become a better city than Singapore when you establish an economic and trade zone there."
I can't think of better advertising for Choson Exchange as a Singapore-based organization supporting economic and commercial education in North Korea.
I don't read Russian but a friend forwarded the following link with the heading "North Korea Develops Own PDA."
We recently took a conference call with a North Korean to discuss Choson Exchange's work in knowledge-sharing and training in Pyongyang. The feedback was helpful as we work to compile our operational model and strategy to include in the fundraising materials we are currently preparing. Some of the points raised by our counterparts were:
1. The desire for scholarships for North Korean students to study in Singapore 2. The desire for CE to expand our current programs in finance/business/economics in Pyongyang to cover certain institutions
We promised to study these requests.
As part of our effort to reach out and inform audiences in the DPRK on the latest thinking on economics policy and business, we are distributing a reader in the DPRK with the following articles. Instead of shipping books to the DPRK, we focus on creating customized materials to be delivered to individual DPRKeans through our contact visiting the Ministry of Light Industry. Improving the Business Environment
1. Doing Business 2010, World Bank 2. Improving Performance at State-Owned Enterprises, McKinsey Quarterly
Managing Foreign Direct Investment
3. Making Foreign Investment Work for China, McKinsey Quarterly 4. Development Finance Report 2009 - Outlook on Foreign Direct Investment, The World Bank
Commercial & Corporate Finance
5. Basel III and Risky Banking, Knowledge@Wharton 6. ABC’s IPO Underscores the ABC of Banking in China, Knowledge@Wharton
E-Commerce
7. Can China Compete on IT Services, McKinsey Quarterly
Infrastructure Development
8. Private Sector Investment Opportunities for Public Infrastructure, McKinsey Quarterly
Singapore has introduced new legislation to tighten sanctions on North Korea. Choson Exchange's work, as an education initiative, is not prohibited under these sanctions. We do not conduct any business with North Korea and we actively monitoring these developments to ensure compliance. For more information on these new legislation, read this article in Today.
Thanks to the generosity of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, we will now being able to share cutting-edge business knowledge with North Koreans through borrowing articles from its Knowledge@Wharton publication.
The Wharton School is considered one of the top business school in the world, and has been consistently ranked number 1 by the Financial Times for the last 10 years and number 2 this year (which incidentally is also one of the preferred international newspapers among political elites in North Korea).
After our last training program, we have a good sense for what we can contribute, what is wanted, and a good working model for how to deliver in (both in terms of trainers and in the operational context of North Korea). Hence, our main goal now is to fund raise to make Choson Exchange more sustainable. While we can continue operating on everyone's own dime as we face rather low costs in North Korea, our main challenge is the need for at least one or two permanent staff who can maintain the channels of communication and ensure that logistics can be handled adequately. These are time-consuming and thankless tasks...but necessary.
If you have any leads on possible fund-raising idea, do contact us at CETeam@chosonexchange.org.
This is our report from our lecture series on Finance and Economic Strategy in Pyongyang. It captures things we learn that will enable us to provide better training, and helps to inform readers on North Korea's business and economic environment. Highlights are below. Need and demand for skills upgrading | Lecturers agreed that there is a strong need for training as participants' financial knowledge and skills, with a few exceptions, are shallow. This is also reinforced by our survey findings. More importantly, participants expressed strong interest in further training programs, which is not always the case in North Korea.
Managing Knowledge-Based Economies & FDI of key interest | Based on discussions with participants, knowledge-based economies and the management of FDI inflows are of great interest to our audience.
Newly-formed economic institution non-operational as yet | An institution meant to play a key role in economic development and was formed in recent years have not yet become operational.
An article from Korea Times recently appeared on our work. We would like to add some comments to further clarify some of the statements that came out in the article: “Choe Thae-bok highly commended our work [this refers to the OpenCourseWare and Wikibooks initiatives we have, not the economic and financial workshops] and sent the president of Kim Chaek University and the vice president of the State Academy of Sciences to meet with us privately,” [...]
They were not in North Korea for political purposes, but their presence attracted enough attention from North Koreans. Reporters from the North’s official Korean Central News Agency also tagged along with them [The KCNA people only interviewed us on one of the days. Unfortunately, they were not so keen on the OCW/Wikibooks idea and just wanted to get comments on Pyongyang from people in favor with higher-ups] .
Apparently, the North Koreans were quite impressed by their academic backgrounds too [This point was made because we were surprised at what the North Koreans we met knew about US academic institutions, and their respect for them]. [...]
In Pyongyang, See and his group members taught North Koreans how to use computers for e-training in finance [this is a reference to OpenCourseWare]. They also offered lectures on the U.S. subprime crisis and the possibility of the Chinese yuan as an international trade settlements currency [We also presented and discussed Singapore's model of strong government with liberal markets]. [...]
“The North Koreans [we met - a subset of North Koreans for sure] were actually quite sophisticated people [some of them - others we trained can be very clueless]. They know what’s happening in the outside world,” said a financial analyst who went to Pyongyang with See, but preferred not to be identified.
“The financial institutions we met are very keen to have us train them and help build the institutions ― especially the newly formed State Development Bank. There is an incredible demand for training,” See said.
I have attached a report sent to our North Korean partner institutions indicating areas of training that is much needed in future sessions. This is a truncated report, and we will follow up with a more complete report later for Choson Exchange visitors. Our confidentiality policy means that we only broadly summarize some of our discussions with our North Korean counterparts. ------------------------------
There is room for extensive cooperation on training with Daesong Bank, the State Development Bank, and other financial institutions as our lecturers feedback and survey results from the training session at Kim Il Sung University e-library (12 participants with lectures recorded and re-broadcast on the intranet) indicate that skill sets for finance (e.g. modeling with excel) is severely lacking and awareness of global financial institutions and models is low.
We recommend more intensive training sessions in-country with a focus on building skill-sets in investment selection, accounting, macro-economics, financial modeling with computers and legal training. This should be complemented with further training abroad that emphasizes building networks and visits to key financial institutions to learn from them.
Above is a picture taken from our lectures on the Singaporean development experience
