The Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) was founded in 1952 under the State Planning Commission of North Korea, but the relationship between these two organizations today is not known.

[13] The Bureau is part of the state planning apparatus by reporting directly to the Administrative Council.

[16] Although the Bureau was founded to collect data for the purposes of administration and economic control, it is unclear if it has access to information about all sectors of the North Korean economy today.

[17] Kim Il Sung himself asserted that statistics compiled by the Bureau are subject to national security considerations and, as such, are not inherently public.

[18] Nicholas Eberstadt illustrates the Bureau's problem with low-quality statistics based on his exchange with its officials in 1990: "In trying to ascertain the definition of an 'urban area' in the DPRK, it soon became clear that there was, in fact, no standard specification demarcating 'urban' and 'rural' communities".

[20] In 1997, North Korea sent GNP per capita statistics compiled by the Bureau to the UN Budget and Finance Committee in the hopes of lowering its United Nations membership fee.

These figures, though excluding some large populated areas, showed such remarkable improvement in nutrition that they were doubted in the UN organizations.

[22] According to Aidan Foster-Carter, a fellow at Leeds University: Normal countries publish figures.