The Country Most Like South Korea on Paper Ranks Last on Income: The Two Koreas, Compared

Pyongyang's average August high is 30.2°C (86°F); Seoul's is 30.9°C (88°F). Income per person is an estimated $1,387 in North Korea and $36,227 in South Korea. Two countries split by a single border nearly overlap on a temperature chart — and on the income chart, they sit at the very bottom and at 19th of the 53 countries WhatsThePop tracks.

Measure how far each country's monthly high-and-low temperature curves sit from South Korea's, and North Korea comes out closest at 8.5. China, the runner-up, is more than twice as far at 18.9. North Korea is also the only country in the catalog that matches South Korea on plug type, driving side, time zone, and official language all at once. For most readers, though, that resemblance stays on paper. South Korean citizens need separate approval from the Ministry of Unification to visit, and U.S. passports have been invalid for travel to North Korea without special validation since 2017 — a restriction most recently renewed through August 31, 2027.

One caveat up front: North Korea publishes no official national accounts. Its economic figures here are Bank of Korea estimates, its population is a CIA World Factbook estimate, and its median age is an outside estimate as well. Life expectancy and urbanization are left out because North Korea is the only one of the 53 countries without data for them. Happiness and livability rankings are left out too, since neither survey covers North Korea.

Start with temperature. Pyongyang's average high matches or trails Seoul's in all 12 months, never by more than 1.8°C (December; March is dead even). Its lows run colder every month of the year, with the widest gap in January: 18°F (−7.8°C) against Seoul's 22°F (−5.6°C). Pyongyang sits about 1.5 degrees of latitude further north.Annual rainfall is 1,336mm in Seoul versus 1,106mm in Pyongyang.

Both use Type C/F outlets. South Korea runs 220V and North Korea 230V, a gap most modern electronics absorb without complaint. Sixteen of the 53 countries share South Korea's exact plug combination and also drive on the right, including Germany, Spain, Turkey, and Uzbekistan. North Korea is the only one of the sixteen on UTC+9. Japan shares that time zone but drives on the left and uses Type A/B plugs. North Korea is also the only other country in the catalog with Korean as an official language.

The time zone hasn't always matched. On August 15, 2015, North Korea set its clocks back 30 minutes to a UTC+8:30 'Pyongyang Time,' then returned to UTC+9 in May 2018, shortly after that April's inter-Korean summit. For roughly two years and nine months, crossing the border meant resetting your watch by half an hour — a history the dataset's current value doesn't show.

The defaults diverge in the details. The emergency number is 112 in the South and 110 in the North, and the country codes are +82 and +850. On this site's English-proficiency measure, South Korea rates 'moderate' and North Korea 'very low,' a tier it shares with only four other catalog countries: Cambodia, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Uzbekistan.

The North is often pictured as the smaller half, but the map says otherwise. North Korea covers 120,538 km² (46,540 sq mi) and South Korea 100,210 km² (38,692 sq mi), making the North 1.2 times larger. The 20,328 km² (7,849 sq mi) difference is a little smaller than New Jersey. In the catalog's area ranking, North Korea sits 36th and South Korea 38th, with Iceland (103,000 km²) wedged between them.

The South has 1.96 times the people: 51.68 million versus 26.40 million. That puts South Korea's density at 516 people per km² (1,336 per sq mi), second of 53, and North Korea's at 219 per km² (567 per sq mi), 13th. Less than half the South's density still lands the North in the catalog's top quarter.

South Korea's GDP per capita is $36,227, 19th of 53. North Korea's estimated $1,387 ranks 53rd — dead last, and barely half (51%) of 52nd-place India at $2,703. Total economic output is $1.872 trillion in the South and $35.9 billion in the North, a 52-fold gap.

Those two figures weren't produced the same way. North Korea's number is the Bank of Korea's 2025 estimate, published in won (48.5 trillion won in nominal gross national income, or 1.873 million won per person), converted here at 1,350 won to the dollar. To build it, the Bank of Korea estimates North Korean output volumes and then values them at South Korean prices and value-added ratios. The result reprices North Korea's production as if it were sold in the South; it says nothing about what goods actually cost in Pyongyang. That makes it a shaky basis for direct comparison with other countries' official statistics.

The comparison is also slightly mismatched. The site's dataset sets South Korea's GDP (World Bank) beside North Korea's GNI (Bank of Korea). When the Bank of Korea compares the two in the same terms, won GNI against won GNI, it finds a 56-fold gap in total income and 28-fold per person — a bit wider than this article's 52× and 26×. The denominator drifts too: dividing the bank's total by its per-person figure implies about 25.89 million people, roughly 510,000 fewer than the CIA estimate in the site's population field (26.40 million).

So the useful reading isn't 26× versus 28× — it's the order of magnitude. Either way, South Korean income per person is somewhere in the high twenties times the North's, and North Korea sits last in the catalog by a wide margin. The industrial base barely overlaps either. The South leads with semiconductors, autos, electronics, shipbuilding, and steel; the North with mining, textiles, chemicals, and metallurgy. Steel and metals are the only common ground.

South Korea's median age of 44.5 is the ninth-highest of the 53 countries. North Korea's 36.2 ranks 27th, between Uruguay (35.8) and Chile (36.4). Two countries sharing a language and a climate split, demographically, into East Asia's aging club and Latin America's middle of the pack. The South Korean side of that story, including how the world's lowest fertility rate reshapes the 2050 population pyramid, is covered in the report 'South Korea's Fertility Rate Is 0.72 — By 2050 It Will Be Older Than Japan.'

North Korea's 36.2 carries far more uncertainty than the South's figure. The country's last census was conducted in 2008 with support from the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). Everything since is an outside projection built on it, so the safe reading is 'roughly eight years younger than the South' rather than a precise rank.

In this comparison, the South's numbers are measured statistics and the North's are mostly estimates. Physical facts like climate, plugs, and driving side are solid on both sides. For anything that needs a functioning statistics office, such as income, population, and age, the North's margin of error is far wider. The safest takeaways are the ones that survive any plausible error: the North is larger in area, and the income gap runs in the twenties.

Each country's detail page lets you line up monthly temperatures and core indicators side by side, and the report 'Same Income, a 17-Rank Gap' runs the same exercise with South Korea's other neighbor. Economic figures are for 2025 (World Bank for the South, Bank of Korea estimates for the North); climate comes from the site's Open-Meteo dataset and area from the world-countries dataset.