Yoon's office signals supplementary budget review

The presidential office on Friday signaled it would consider a supplementary budget with President Yoon Suk Yeol addressing the issue of social polarization as the policy priority its administration should tackle.

A senior official of the presidential office said that it "will not rule out the possibilities of the proactive fiscal intervention including the allocation of an extra budget," adding the timing for the supplementary budget "has yet to be determined."

This signals an apparent U-turn from Yoon's push to maintain fiscal discipline in a country where the ratio of government debt to the gross domestic product has rarely exceeded 50 percent in modern history.

The remarks follow the International Monetary Fund's downward revision of South Korea's economic growth outlook for next year, from 2.2 percent to 2 percent, earlier this week.

Also on Friday, Yoon stressed a need to address a deepening social divide to strengthen the middle class in Asia's fourth-largest economy.

"We sought to stimulate the private sector-driven economic growth in the first half of the administration, and in the second half, we should make people have hope for the future by tackling the social disparity," Yoon said at the national prayer breakfast held in Hotel Shilla Seoul.

He added that strengthening the nation's middle class by narrowing the social divide in income and education could "get everyone involved in national economic growth."

As he embarked on the second half of his five-year term until 2027, Yoon was quoted as saying by his spokesperson Jeong Hey-jeon that his administration needs "forward-looking effort to address social polarization by tackling income disparity and imbalance in the access to education in his second term," during a closed-door meeting with his aides on Nov. 11.

Meanwhile, the National Assembly, where the liberal opposition parties including the Democratic Party of Korea control the majority, has been discussing the 677.4 trillion won ($483.8 billion) national budget for 2025 that the government proposed in August. The national budget proposal saw a 3.2 percent hike from the previous year.

Throughout Yoon's term so far, a total of 59.4 trillion won extra budget was approved in May 2022, just a few days after Yoon's inauguration, to mainly make up for the losses of the mom-and-pop store owners due to the COVID-19 pandemic's fallout.