Why North Korea's Time Zone Change Is Bad For Business
North Korea is putting its clocks back by 30 minutes from August 15, which could screw with computers
By Brian Patrick Byrne on Aug 07, 2015 at 15:12 PM
"You forgot to carry the one." REUTERS
North Korea’s decision to switch time zones makes it even harder for the rest of the world to deal with the notoriously reclusive nation, in real and technological terms.
The government’s state news agency has announced that from August 15 it will use “Pyongyang Time,” effectively reverting from GMT+9 to GMT+8.5, a timezone used across the Korean peninsula until it was colonized by Japan.
Executive director of the American Watchmakers-Clockmakers Institute Jordan Ficklin said the government’s decision to revert clocks by a half hour, rather than a full hour, will make doing business with foreign nations more difficult.
China accounted for 76 percent of North Korea’s total exports in 2013, according to estimates by the CIA World Factbook, followed by South Korea with 16 percent. Both North and South Korea are currently one hour ahead of China.
A 2011 study from the University of East Anglia in England found that each hour of time difference reduced international goods trade by between three and seven percent. “One would expect … that any negative effect of time differences on trade is greater where formal mechanisms of contract enforcement are weaker, or where social, business or co-ethnic networks are absent,” said author Dr. Edward Anderson.
“[There’s] going to be a lot of man hours spent to accommodate what they’re doing in North Korea.”—Jordan Ficklin, watchmaker
Ficklin said changing time zones by a half hour would only create further difficulties for imports and exports to North Korea, which had an estimated GPD of $40 billion in 2013, dwarfed by South Korea’s $1.41 trillion. “To move by a half hour in today’s modern world seems odd because it’s much easier to move by an hour or two hours. To say they’re moving by a half hour makes doing commerce with other people in the world more difficult,” he said.
He added that the change will also present difficulties for computer programmers, who will be forced to develop the entirely new timezone for devices—not to mention physical map makers. “The people who establish time zones on devices are going to have to rewrite their code. That’s going to be a lot of man hours spent to accommodate what they’re doing in North Korea,” said Ficklin.
North Korea will be the only country in the world with GMT+8.5, but several other countries, including Iran, India and Afghanistan, have timezones which fall on the half hour. It’s also not the first country to create its own timezone. In 2007, Venezuela moved backwards by a half hour to GMT-4.5, as president Hugo Chavez wanted to give residents a “more fair distribution of the sunrise”. The Himalayan Kingdom of Nepal has the world’s least convenient timezone, 5.45 hours ahead of GMT.
North Korea’s government doesn’t have to ask anyone else’s permission, either: There is no international body which controls time zones. Chinese communists replaced China’s five time zones with a single time zone in 1949. The entire country is now GMT+8, despite being roughly the same size as the U.S., which has six time zones (including Alaska and Hawaii).
http://www.vocativ.com/news/219599/why-north-koreas-time-zone-change-is-bad-for-business/
