By Firm, Not by Region: Central Management and State Attention in North Korea

Publication Details

Authors: Jacob Reidhead
Status / Format: Preprint / Journal Article
Citation: Reidhead, Jacob, By Firm, Not by Region: Central Management and State Attention in North Korea (2026). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=7618098 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.7618098
Year / Venue: 2026 / SSRN
Publisher / DOI / Document: 10.2139/ssrn.7618098
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Publication Content

Abstract

Comparative explanations of subnational economic variation under authoritarian rule emphasize room for local initiative. They point to fiscal resources, foreign investment, capable local bureaucracies, and the career incentives of local cadres. In North Korea, a highly centralized and low-capacity regime, these channels are muted. This paper contrasts two types of centralization. The first is firm-level central management. The second is province-level central-party oversight. The primary hypothesis is that firm-level management matters far more than provincial oversight for the attention the state gives enterprises. I link a registry of 3,674 enterprises from the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade (KIET) to 33,702 enterprise–article links in 310,063 KCNA and Rodong Sinmun articles published between 1998 and 2025. Firm-level models with sector, entry-period, development-zone, and firm-size controls support the hypothesis. Centrally managed firms have 3.0 times the odds of being mentioned and receive about 6 times as many references. Provincial oversight has no independent effect, and no management-by-oversight interaction is significant. Contrary to expectation, coverage of regionally managed firms is more ideological. Central attention is also associated with longer activity spans and a higher chance of still being reported in 2023–2025. These patterns suggest that attention may bring resources, but they do not measure output or productivity. Provinces under weaker oversight do not have more diverse industrial structures.

Keywords

Authoritarian Governance, Central-Local Relations, North Korea, Official Media, State-Owned Enterprises, Text as Data

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