Finance minister holds meeting to discuss economic risks at home and abroad

All News 16:15 March 22, 2022

SEOUL, March 22 (Yonhap) -- Finance Minister Hong Nam-ki on Tuesday held an emergency meeting to discuss economic risk factors at home and abroad, including growing inflationary pressure and global supply chain disruptions.

Hong met with ranking officials at the finance ministry to discuss ways to tackle a set of economic risks and how to respond to them amid concerns about stagflation, a mix of slumping growth and high inflation.

The main agenda items of the meeting included the economic impact from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, trends in the foreign exchange market and ways to improve fiscal soundness, the ministry said.

Hong stressed the need to make policy efforts to prevent such risk factors from undermining economic growth and financial stability in a time of change of governments.

President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol is set to take office on May 10 with pledges to ease regulations to let the private sector lead economic growth and job creation.

Earlier in the day, Yoon raised the need to create another round of an extra budget to compensate merchants and businesses hit hard by the pandemic for their losses caused by tough virus curbs.

During the election campaign, he promised to spend 50 trillion won (US$41 billion) to compensate their business losses.

In February, the country drew up this year's first extra budget of 16.9 trillion won to support pandemic-hit merchants and vulnerable people.