FACTBOX-Huge divide between rival Koreas

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SEOUL, June 28 (Reuters) - North Korea's economy in 2008, before its latest falling out with the international community, grew to where it was three years ago, helped by a bumper harvest and foreign aid, South Korea's central bank said on Sunday.

Tensions flared between the rival Koreas this week after the North tested a nuclear device and threatened to attack the South.

In the aftermath of the 1950-53 Korean War, the North's economy developed more quickly, but in the past few decades South Korea has emerged as an economic powerhouse while the North has become a backwater with an annual GDP of $17 billion in 2008 -- two percent the size of the South's economy.

South Korea is one of the world's most wired countries whereas North Korea has few computers, almost no Internet access outside the capital Pyongyang and teaches students about the Web by showing them photocopied papers of monitor displays.

The South has about 20 nuclear power plants while the North relies on an electrical grid mostly built during Japan's 1910-45 colonial occupation of Korea and cannot produce enough power to keep the lights on at night.

South Korean estimates have said it would cost $1 trillion or more to absorb the North in the event of reunification.

There are almost no economic or cultural contacts between the two Koreas, as there were in East and West Germany before unification that could help cushion the blow.

Here is a look at the vast difference between the two Koreas:

South Korea North Korea

Population 2008 48.6 million 23.3 million

Life expectancy 78.72 years 63.81 years

74.45 for males 61.23 males

82.22 for females 66.53 females

Mobile phone subscribers 46.5 million 20,000

Paved roads 2008 104,236 km 25,802 km