Via The Economist, a look at how the world’s most insular regime is flirting with economic reforms:

CAN you be both the world’s most brutal wielder of state terror and a fan of economic opening? Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s ruler, appears to be having a go. Three months ago Mr Kim suddenly purged his immensely powerful uncle by marriage, Jang Sung Taek, and had him executed, supposedly for treason. Now the young dictator may have purged the other regent who oversaw the leadership succession after Mr Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, died in late 2011. Choe Ryong Hae, who had the rank of marshal (though a civilian), was reckoned to be the second-most powerful man in the country. He has not been seen in public since February 16th, and rumours are swirling about his fate.

With such ruthlessness, Mr Kim may have found his inner Stalin. Yet tantalising hints are also multiplying that the government is getting serious about economic reforms of the kind that were anathema to Kim Jong Il. Last year it was announced that over a dozen economic-development zones around the country would be established—the kind of zones, inviting foreign investment, which set China’s economy alight in the late 1970s. Astonishingly, the government has also praised an experiment in family-based farming, seeming to hint at a loosening of the strictures of collectivised agriculture. A building boom is changing the skyline of Pyongyang, the capital. And a once-closed country is welcoming foreign visitors. In January a ski resort, Masikryong, opened its doors. It was built in record time, and supposedly to international standards. The country’s army, government institutions and decrepit enterprises are being urged to dive into their work with “Masikryong speed”.

Much remains unclear, including the motivation for such changes (in North Korea at least, never use the R-word—reform). Could it even be that the regime wants to improve the lot of ordinary folk? North Korea’s economic backwardness is surely a growing embarrassment to its administrators, increasingly aware of the outside world, through the North’s trade with China and from growing knowledge about vibrant South Korea. Some are being versed, thanks to foreign assistance programmes, in modern administration and basic financial theory. Pressure for change within the system is growing, and competition for scarce foreign investment is intense.

Improving the common lot does not have to be entirely at odds with the regime’s narrower and overriding motivation: to secure enough resources to keep the Pyongyang elites, who form a tiny fraction of the population, sweet with financial perks and luxury goods. Elite cohesion is central to the survival of a regime that has outlasted by decades predictions of its demise. In the past, such resources were secured through criminal rackets selling weapons, drugs and counterfeit money, as well as by shaking down the outside world using nuclear blackmail. Yet in recent years, the world has wised up, and foreign currency has slowed to a trickle. What little was available may have been exhausted on Mr Kim’s childlike peccadillos, including a dolphinarium, water theme-park and equestrian club as well as the loss-making ski resort. It would be a brave person who challenged Mr Kim’s pet projects. But the regime has fewer resources to spray about.

Mr Jang’s execution may well be connected. Enterprises under Mr Jang were central to the state’s moneymaking, and he may have been keeping back huge amounts for himself and cronies. Almost certainly that rankled with the Korean People’s Army. In December Radio Free Asia claimed that an armed clash took place between soldiers and Mr Jang’s agents over control of a profitable fishing spot off the west coast. That month soldiers involved in the fisheries were treated to an outing at Mr Kim’s new water park. The dictator reassured the army that it must “continue to take the lead in fishing”. In 2012 the North’s fish and seafood exports to China totalled $67m, ranking as its sixth-most valuable export item, according to KOTRA, South Korea’s investment-promotion agency.

Trading rights are another coveted resource. Licences for excavating coal, gold, silver and iron ore are divvied up and doled out to the regime’s most powerful organisations. Mr Jang’s department managed a host of firms that held licences to trade with China. His biggest deals by far were in coal: Sungri Trading, run by two of Mr Jang’s closest aides, handled 70% of all North Korea’s lucrative anthracite exports to China, according to Cho Bong-hyun at the IBK Economic Research Institute, in Seoul, South Korea’s capital. Both men were executed in November.

The military court that sentenced Mr Jang charged him with building a “little kingdom”. Cheong Seong-chang of the Sejong Institute near Seoul says Mr Jang’s business came to be seen as a “fourth economy” outside those run by the Korean Workers’ Party, the army and the government. For Mr Kim to allow such wide-ranging privileges suggests how keen he was to use the currency Mr Jang raked in—until it was clear how much was being kept back.

The potential sums involved are large. In 2012 trade between China and North Korea topped $6 billion, twice the level of three years earlier, according to KOTRA figures. Nine-tenths of exports of iron ore and coal go to China. The mines operate at under a third of their capacity, suffering from rundown machinery and patchy supplies of electricity. But delays and poor quality allow China to exact huge discounts, knowing how few countries the North can sell to, because of international sanctions.

Mr Kim is presumably desperate to be less dependent on China, a country many North Koreans resent (the new economic zones have next to no Chinese involvement). It may help explain a mildly friendlier approach to the South, after ructions last year. Last month the regime allowed brief reunions to go ahead for families separated for decades. Senior officials from both sides met at the border for the first time in years. And South Korean business investment is encouraged in a railway and port at Rajin-Sonbong, close to Russia.

Ripping off foreigners remains a patriotic duty, and the changes do not yet amount to a real opening. Even if they did, it would be wrong to expect any diminution of repression in the world’s cruellest state. North Korea, says Aidan Foster-Carter, an expert at Leeds University, reserves the right to pursue economic restructuring without political openness—perestroika without the glasnost.