By Xinhua,
SEOUL : South Korea’s new Finance Minister Yoon Jeung-hyun on Tuesday promised to create more jobs and extra budgets to stimulate the withered economy.
“Jitters in the world financial sector continue and it is likely that the global economy goes through a prolonged recession for a considerable period of time. It will be tough for our export-driven economy, including the job market, to attain positive growth this year,” Yoon Jeung-hyun said at his inauguration speech.
“Against this backdrop, we need to maintain expansionary macroeconomic polices. Our top priority will be to create jobs through demand-boosting measures and to that end, we will continue to infuse liquidity to the market and push for a supplementary budget as soon as possible,” he said.
Yoon, a former head of the Financial Supervisory Commission, was nominated as the finance minister by President Lee Myung-bak in late January and took office earlier on Tuesday.
At the National Assembly’s hearing held on last Friday, Yoon stressed the need for an extra budget and asked for support for his new plans on expanded government spending.
Although the new finance minister did not give details on the scale and timing of his budget plans, experts expect that the extra budget would hit a record high of 10 trillion won, or 7.2 billion U.S. dollars.
“We need to regain market trust with our new polices as quickly as possible. I will work hard to estimate the current economic conditions objectively and ensure enough communication and consensus-building efforts in the overall policy-making process,” Yoon said.