North Korea’s business and investment environment is a subject on which little contemporary information exists, despite the country’s strategic location between three of the world’s largest economies.

While in the early 2000s a relatively large number of Western companies expressed interest in the emerging North Korean market, following Pyongyang’s nuclear test in 2006 and a subsequent ratcheting of UN sanctions, much of this interest consequently dwindled.

And although investment and cooperation was once directly encouraged by the Seoul government, it all but halted under President Lee Myung-bak in 2010 – in retaliation for what was said to be a North