Officials stated Sunday that President-elect Yoon Suk-new yeol’s government will present a supplementary budget proposal worth 34-36 trillion won ($26.8-28 billion) later this week in order to help merchants hit severely by the virus.
According to government insiders, the finance ministry aims to release specifics of this year’s second supplemental budget this week, after Yoon takes office on Tuesday.
The now-defunct transition committee had stated that the new government intends to spend 33.1 trillion won or more to completely compensate microbusiness owners for their losses.
Yoon promised to spend roughly 50 trillion won on the reparation scheme during his election campaign. After extracting the 16.9 trillion won extra budget produced in February from Yoon’s proposal, the team determined the amount of projected support.
Due to the government’s strict antiviral limitations, the transition team anticipated that self-employed people’s operational revenues fell by 54 trillion won between 2020 and 2021.
To deal with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Moon Jae-in government has put up seven rounds of extra budgets totaling 134 trillion won since 2020. It has given merchants harmed by the pandemic a total of 35.1 trillion won, substantially less than their predicted damages.
The finance ministry has announced that it will cut non-essential spending and use reserve cash to cover an additional budget. However, given the enormity of the increased money, a debt sale is inevitable.
According to government estimates, South Korea’s national debt will hit 1,075.7 trillion won this year, the first time it will surpass the 1,000 trillion won level.
This year, the debt-to-GDP ratio is forecast to hit a new high of 50.1 percent, and the budget deficit is expected to hit 70.8 trillion won, or 3.3 percent of GDP.
Kelly Choi is a Korean Journalist. Kelly resides in Busan. She is currently working as a journalist at The Shining Media. Earlier she did work for some regional news media of Busan.
