After decades of symbolic salaries and quiet defections to the private sector, North Korea is attempting its most ambitious economic reset in years. 

Since late 2023, the government has rolled out sweeping wage increases — as much as 50-fold for some public sector workers — in a bid to revive the moribund state economy and reassert control over a population that long ago learned to survive outside it. 

The campaign, unprecedented in scope, marks Pyongyang’s most serious effort yet to lure citizens back into the state fold and reverse the erosion of central authority caused by decades of informal market