Reforms boost N Korean worker incentives NORTH Korean farmers have a new incentive during this year's crucial rice planting season - possible bonuses that are part of an economic shift echoing China's steps three decades ago toward embracing capitalism. Details about the changes are emerging nearly two months after the regime unveiled dual goals of building the economy and nuclear weapons in the first concrete economic policy laid out by leader Kim Jong-un since he took power in December 2011. Farmers say they have begun working under the new policies, which are designed to boost production by giving managers and workers financial incentives. Foreign analysts say the moves to spur North Korea's moribund economy suggest Pyongyang is taking cues from Beijing on how to incorporate free market ideas within its rigid socialist system. Impoverished North Korea suffers chronic food and power shortages and has not released economic data for decades. South Korea's central bank estimates the North's gross national income, an indicator of the average standard of living, was $US1250 per person in 2011 compared with $US23,400 in South Korea. In the past, the North Korean state set workers' salaries. Under new measures announced April 1, the managers of farms, factories and other enterprises have been given leeway to set salaries and offer raises to workers who help drive up production. "This is definitely significant," said John Delury, an assistant professor of Chinese studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. Providing material incentives and loosening central control over economic decision making are two key elements in the transition from a command economy to a market-based system, he said. Also announced on April 1 was the reappointment of Pak Pong Ju as premier after his dismissal from the post in 2007. Pak was central to attempts at economic change more than a decade ago. You just wouldn't bring back Pak Pong Ju unless you were going to try readjusting economy policy. There would be no reason to do that," said Delury, calling it a strong sign of Kim Jong-un's interest in lifting living standards. North Korea's policy changes find an echo in China's market reforms that have transformed it into a manufacturing powerhouse and the world's second-largest economy while also lifting several hundred million out of grinding poverty. Beijing dismantled its centrally planned economy slowly. In the 1970s, it began allowing farmers to keep more of their harvests, giving them an incentive to grow more to sell on newly permitted free markets. Food production soared. In the mid-1980s, the government gave state enterprises the authority to link bonuses and salaries to better performance. Those changes were mostly aimed at managers, but they cracked a communist-era preference for egalitarianism. New rules in the early 1990s gave state enterprises full flexibility to set wages, widening the use of performance incentives. In that decade, China truly broke away from its centralised "iron rice bowl" system of guaranteed employment and state-set incomes. Delury and others cautioned that if North Korea is intent on economic reform, it is likely to be a fitful process. "We have to be careful not to say 'Aha, it's all change, it's finally here'," he said. The point is, and we see this from the Chinese case, this is a process that unfolds over time and there are starts and stops, too. But this is a strong signal of a push.