A study from a South Korean government-funded think tank warns that researchers should not expect new, annual updates on North Korea’s informal economy in the near future due to the decline in defections since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Defector surveys, essentially the only source of micro-level data allowing quantitative analysis on what ordinary North Koreans earn and spend, have been lacking because of a decline in new defections, according to the Korea Development Institute’s latest DPRK analysis by Bank of Korea economist Yongshin Cho.

Several institutions have annually surveyed defectors, such as Seoul National University’s Institute for Peace and Unification Studies