Health Disparities under black market transition of health system in North Korea

In North Korea, socialist health system was centrally planned and administered by central government. But, after breakdown of centralized health system during great famine in 1990s, the decentralized and unregulated health system have been sharply expanded with formal/informal market mechanism, mainly through black market. Despite of its critical function, emerging local health system has been unilaterally suppressed by political motivation to stabilize regime in rapid political transition; and abandoned by poorly governed, fragmented, discriminative health reform in between political dilemmas of socialist and capitalist policies toward existing market function. Thus the presentation aims to describe politics of stagnating health reform in North Korea, by describing (i) health disparities in recent black marketization of health system in chronic economic isolation; and (ii) analyzing poorly governed, fragmented and discriminative health reforms in-between socialist and capitalist policies.

Given the inaccessibility to North Korea, relevant data will be gathered from i) Literature review of published and unpublished documents on the current state of marketization, population health, health risks, and health systems in North Korea; as well as ii) Secondary data analysis (including data from UN and international organizations, NGOs, and academic institutions); iii) twenties qualitative interviews with North Korean health professionals and relevant scholars and policy makers working inside and outside North Korea.