North Korea’s recent currency reform made the communist country secure by filling the state coffer, said a North Korean economist on Saturday, Yonhap said.
The currency revaluation helped "implement socialist economic principles better and create a monetary base that can bring about a leap in the standard of living for people," Kim Chol-jun, chief economist at North Korea's Academy of Social Sciences, said in an interview with Chosun Sinbo, a pro-Pyongyang paper in Tokyo.
Pyongyang said the currency redenomination, which knocked two zeros off its bank notes, was aimed at curbing inflation, while analysts said the regime was trying to emasculate a growing merchant class and reassert control over market activities.
A ranking Unification Ministry official in Seoul told reporters earlier this month that the currency reform in the North "was still under way," suggesting the regime was taking steps to empower its new currency and state-run shops and crack down on unregistered trade.