Before Kim Jong Un’s rise to power, the North Korean government principally focused on wage and price controls as a centerpiece of macroeconomic policy. Now North Korean economic policy is dominated by incentives and innovation. But before that, they tried a spot of demand-side policy that was quite redolent of the post-war Keynesianism.

To be fair to Keynes and his many supporters, he would definitely not have advocated what the North Korean government did in the 2000s. But in some of their policies and some of their diagnosis of the problems they faced, a bastardized reading of John Maynard Keynes can be discerned. The focus was on the demand-side, not the supply-side.