The system is based on trust—and exorbitant fees
I N FEBRUARY 2018 Jessie Kim found out that she had been sending money to a dead man. Ms Kim, now a 27-year-old student in Seoul, fled North Korea for China in 2011. She had been sending her father in Yanggang province in the North around $1,000 a year since she arrived in South Korea in early 2014. Two years later she doubled the contributions, working several part-time jobs, after her aunt told her that her father had been in an accident and needed money for medical bills.
The annual total may run into the tens of millions of dollars. That is low compared with remittances from workers sent abroad by the state, which are estimated to be in the hundreds of millions. But it is substantial both relative to North Korean GDP per person, reckoned to be between $1,000 and $2,000 a year, and as a share of income earned by North Koreans in South Korea, who make around $1,300 a month on average.
Singapore Latest News, Singapore Headlines
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