• Military

• WMD Menu                           

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

DPRK, Tax-free Country

Korean Central News Agency of DPRK via Korea News Service (KNS)

   Pyongyang, May 21 (KCNA) -- More than three decades have elapsed since the tax system was abolished in the DPRK.
    The word "tax" has faded out of the minds of the Korean people and the younger generation knows nothing of the word itself.
    After the liberation of the country (August 15, 1945) the depredatory tax system of the Japanese imperialists was abolished and a popular and democratic tax system was established in the DPRK, thus putting an end to over 50 kinds of miscellaneous taxes and turning the taxation into a single one.
    In Juche 44 (1955) the government of the country again cut the income tax of the workers and office employees by 30 percent, sharply reduced the tax burden of the handicraftsmen, entrepreneurs and merchants and decreased the agricultural tax in kind from 25 percent of the grain output to 20.1 percent on an average. From 1959 it reduced the agricultural tax in kind to 8.4 percent.
    The agricultural tax in kind, which had been instituted right after the liberation, was eliminated in the period from 1964 to 1966 for good in accordance with "Theses on the Socialist Rural Question in Our Country" authored by President Kim Il Sung.
    As a result there remained in the country only the income tax of the working people and the negligible local autonomy tax. The tax paid by the population amounted to two percent or less in the revenue of the state budget.
    The Third Session of the Fifth Supreme People's Assembly adopted the law on the complete abolition of the tax system on March 21, 1974.
    The DPRK thus became the first tax-free country in the world.