The Rajin Business Institute is the only Western-style business school operating in North Korea, training prospective businessmen needed for settling down and maintaining the capitalist market system Pyongyang has been experimenting within the Rajin-Sonbong free trade zone. Located in the zone, from which the local residents have been evacuated, the institute is regarded by some as a liberated area that could eventually transform the North's socialist economic system into a capitalist one.

The institute teaches 11 practical business subjects needed to understand the market economy; business finance, accounting, bank and project financing, inventory control, services and tourism management, business administration, marketing, international trade, tax laws and business laws. Also taught are computer operations for business purposes, English and Chinese. The textbooks, compiled by the faculty, are available in Korean and English.

Also used as texts are foreign publications involving the market economy, including those published in South Korea, according to Kim Ja-yon, a Korean businessman resident in the United States, who donated US$300,000 worth of teaching equipment to the institute when it was launched in 1998. But the school keeps only copies of those publications, which are forwarded to research agencies in Pyongyang studying ways of opening the North, limited as it is, through a study of capitalism. Among such agencies are the External Economies Research Institute, affiliated with the Trade Ministry's Research Bureau, the International Affairs Research Institute and Kim Il Sung University's Department of Politics and Economics. The Rajin Business Institute thus plays the role of collecting foreign documents required for studying a limited opening of the North's market to the outside world.

Affiliated with the Rajin Maritime College, located not far from the Rajin Port, the Rajin Business Institute uses the fourth floor of the college's Maritime Navigation annex for its lecture rooms.

In accordance with the institute's objective of turning out personnel needed for the operation of the Rajin-Sonbong Trade Zone, the institute's graduates find jobs mostly at foreign-invested firms operating in the Rajin-Sonbong Zone. Employing the largest numbers of them are the world-renowned Royal Dutch Shell Group that has set up crude oil refining facilities near the port of Rajin, the Thailand-based Rocksley Group, taking charge of communications in the free trade zone, and Hong Kong-based Emperor Group that runs the Hwanggwan Hotel, according to Kim. As Chinese tourists visiting the zone have risen in number, the hotel has recently employed more graduates from the institute. Graduates from the institute are generally well regarded as hard workers.

Graduates are also hired by the Rason City People's Committee, which administers the Rajin-Sonbong Free Trade Zone; an indication that the institute may function as a training base for economic bureaucrats demanded when Pyongyang adopts a partially-open market system.

The institute offered only a six-month course at its inauguration, but now runs one- and two-year courses. With a quorum of 50 students per course, the institute has produced a total of 350 graduates from the 1998 second-term to this year's second term.

Accommodated in the institute are mostly applicants coming from Hamgyong provinces, geographically near the Rajin-Sonbong Trade Zone, and some from across the country. Successful candidates should have favorable family and ideological backgrounds.

The faculty originally consisted of professionals hailing from Singapore and Thailand and about a score of North Koreans who had undergone a five-month business administration course at Nanjing University in Singapore. Some ethnic Koreans born in China and the United States have subsequently joined the faculty.

The Rajin Business Institute runs the Rajin Business Information Center, where students and foreign investors have access to all kinds of information about the Rajin-Sonbong Free Trade Zone through an intranet. The center has a stock of over 1,500 English publications, journals and supplementary teaching materials.

(Lee Kyo-kwan, haedang@chosun.com )