North Korea

North Korea: Mass Mobilization, Measured Through Gaps

This briefing is short by design. The dataset for North Korea is sparse, and the honest account of it is correspondingly limited. Readers should treat the absences below as findings in their own right.

What the data shows

The population figure is current: 26.5 million in 2024, per World Bank WDI. Against that, Correlates of War National Material Capabilities data for 2022 record 1,280,000 active personnel — a mobilization level that stands out as the single most striking number in the file. The same 2022 COW data give a CINC score of 0.014094, or about 1.4 percent of global material capability, as CINC is expressed as a share of the world total.

The FAS Nuclear Notebook puts the North Korean warhead inventory at 50 as of 2025. That is the most recent observation in the dataset and the only nuclear datapoint supplied.

Military spending is recorded once, at $1.60 billion, and that figure is from 2018 per SIPRI. No later observation is available, so the trajectory of defense outlays over the past seven years cannot be established here.

V-Dem v15 scores for 2025 are at the floor of each index, which runs from 0 to 1: electoral democracy 0.083, liberal democracy 0.014 and state capacity 0.033.

Our World in Data records primary energy consumption of 0.6642 exajoules in 2023 and electricity generation of 27.1 TWh in 2024. Both oil and gas production are recorded at zero, but those entries date from 2016 and should not be read as current.

What is missing

No GDP, GDP per capita, government debt or foreign reserves figure is supplied for North Korea. That gap matters: without output data, the 2018 SIPRI spending figure cannot be expressed as a share of the economy, and no defense burden can be stated. Nor can the cost of sustaining 1.28 million personnel be set against national resources.

Also absent: trade, arms transfers, conflict events and casualty data. Analysts needing an economic denominator for North Korea will not find one here, and this briefing does not substitute an estimate for it.

Sources: World Bank WDI; SIPRI Military Expenditure Database; Correlates of War National Material Capabilities; FAS Nuclear Notebook; V-Dem v15; Our World in Data (Energy).