North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and top officials have been increasing visits to provincial areas in a bid to improve the lives of people outside the capital, pushing forward the new 20×10 policy that aims to build hundreds of factories over the next decade.

The policy represents the leader’s latest strategy to address the vexing problem of regional inequality due to uneven development, but the top-down approach marks a major departure from the bottom-up policies that Kim embraced earlier in his rule.

Previously, the central government gave regionally managed state-owned enterprises greater autonomy but