BOK WARNS SOUTH KOREA’S ECONOMY MAY ENTER NEGATIVE TERRITORY IN 2040S

SEOUL, Dec 17 (Bernama-Yonhap) — A research institute of the Bank of Korea (BOK) said Sunday that South Korea may be forced to record negative economic growth in the 2040s unless the nation improves its productivity, as its working-age population is rapidly shrinking.

According to Yonhap news agency, the BOK’s Economic Research Institute expected South Korea’s economy to grow some 2.1 percent in the 2020s and some 0.6 percent in the 2030s but to shrink some 0.1 percent in the 2040s.

The assessment by Cho Tae-hyung, vice head of the institute, was based on an assumption that South Korea may fail to improve its productivity to make up for a decline in the working-age population.

If South Korea improves its productivity to cope with a demographic change, the report predicted that the nation’s economy would grow some 2.4 percent in the 2020s, some 0.9 percent in the 2030s and some 0.2 percent in the 2040s, it reported.

“It is most important to keep productivity growth to mitigate future slowdowns in economic growth,” Cho said in the report.

The BOK has recently projected South Korea’s economy to grow 1.4 percent for all of 2023, down from a 2.6 percent expansion in 2022.

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