The Central Bureau of Statistics of North Korea conducted the most recent census in 2008, where the population reached 24 million inhabitants.

[2] According to The World Factbook, North Korea is racially homogeneous and contains a small Chinese community and a few ethnic Japanese.

[11] Thus, on the basis of remarks made by President Kim Il Sung in 1977 concerning school attendance, the population that year was calculated at 17.2 million persons.

[12] Although the country lacks trained demographers, accurate data on household registration, migration, and births and deaths are available to North Korean authorities.

[12] According to the United States scholar Nicholas Eberstadt and demographer Judith Banister, vital statistics and personal information on residents are kept by agencies on the ri, or ni (Korean: 리; Hanja: 里: village, the local administrative unit) level in rural areas and the dong (동; 洞: district or block) level in urban areas.

[13] In their 1992 monograph, The Population of North Korea, Eberstadt and Banister use the data given to the UNFPA and make their own assessments.

[12][16] The figures disclosed by the government reveal an unusually low proportion of males to females: in 1980 and 1987, the male-to-female ratios were 86.2 to 100, and 84.2 to 100, respectively.

[12] The male-to-female ratio would be expected to rise to a normal level with the passage of years, as happened between 1953 and 1970, when the figure was 95.1 males per 100 females.

[18][19] A survey in 2017 found that the famine had skewed North Korea's demography, impacting particularly on male infants.

[17] This fall reflected a dramatic decline in the fertility rate: the average number of children born to women decreased from 6.5 in 1966 to 2.5 in 1988.

[17] The experience of other socialist countries suggests that widespread labor force participation by women often goes hand-in-hand with more traditional role expectations; in other words, they are still responsible for housework and childrearing.

[17] However, the CIA World Factbook estimated that North Korea's annual population growth rate was 1.0% in 1991 and that it has since declined to 0.4% by 2009.

[17] According to one Korean American scholar who visited North Korea in the early 1980s, the country has no birth control policies; parents are encouraged to have as many as six children.

[17] The state provides tagaso (nurseries) to lessen the burden of childrearing for parents and offers a 77-day paid leave after childbirth.

[17] Eberstadt and Banister suggest, however, that authorities at the local level make contraceptive information readily available to parents and that intrauterine devices are the most commonly adopted birth control method.

[17] An interview with a former North Korean resident in the early 1990s revealed that such devices are distributed free at clinics.

[17] Many poor, developing countries have a broad base and steadily tapering higher levels, which reflects a large number of births and young children but much smaller age cohorts in later years as a result of relatively short life expectancies.

[21] North Korea does not entirely fit this pattern; data reveal a "bulge" in the lower ranges of adulthood.

[21] Eberstadt and Banister project that the population will stabilize (that is, cease to grow) at 34 million persons in 2045 and will then experience a gradual decline.

[22] And, in North Korea, people who engage in agricultural pursuits inside municipalities sometimes are not counted as urban.

[22] In 1987, North Korea's largest cities were Pyongyang, with approximately 2.3 million inhabitants; Hamhung, 701,000; Chongjin, 520,000; Nampo, 370,000; Sunchon, 356,000; and Sinuiju, 289,000.

Many resident Koreans, loyal to North Korea, remain separate from, and often hostile to, the Japanese social mainstream.

[citation needed] In addition, third- and fourth-generation Zainichi Chosenjin have largely given up active participation or loyalty to the Chongryon ideology.

[citation needed] Reasons stated for this increased disassociation include widespread mainstream tolerance of Koreans by Japanese in recent years, greatly reducing the need to rely on Chongryon and the increasing unpopularity of Kim Jong Il even among loyal members of Chongryon.

[citation needed] Between 1959 and 1982, Chongryon encouraged the repatriation of Korean residents in Japan to North Korea.

[24] In normalization talks between North Korean and Japanese officials in the early 1990s, the latter urged unsuccessfully that the wives be allowed to make home visits.

Japanese research puts the number of Zainichi Korean returnees condemned to prison camps at around 10,000.