The government for the first time published a report from a study of North Korea's economy and society based on interviews with more than six-thousand defectors over the past two decades.

The report released by the unification ministry on Tuesday shows that 51-point-seven percent of North Koreans who defected after 2012 when leader Kim Jong-un came to power spoke negatively about the succession. The negative assessment rose to 56-point-three percent when counting the responses of those who defected between 2016 and 2020.

While over 60 percent of respondents who fled before 2016 said they had never received state food provisions amid a chronic shortage, that figure jumped to 72-point-two percent when the same question was asked to those who crossed over between 2016 and 2020.

Despite the communist state's stringent control over information from the outside, 83-point-three percent of defectors between 2016 and 2020 said they had accessed video contents from outside the regime, including South Korea.
 
The report was drawn up from the ministry's collection of information on the North's economy and society between 2013 and 2022, from which data regarding North Koreans who defected since before 2000 were divided into five-year terms.