A senior official of the global rating agency Standard & Poor’s said Wednesday that the South Korean economy could grow at an average rate of 2.9% per year until 2019, Yonhap reported. Kim Eng Tan, senior director of Asia-Pacific sovereign ratings at S&P, made the assessment of Asia’s fourth-largest economy, citing South Korea has globally competitive companies and its industrial sector is properly distributed. He said South Korea’s expected average annual growth rate between 2016 and 2019 is higher than those of advanced countries and it is also higher than the 2.6% growth recorded last year. His assessment was included in a press release ahead of a seminar on credit risks in Seoul. In the April-June period, South Korea’s gross domestic product expanded 0.8% from the previous quarter, accelerating from a 0.5% on-quarter expansion three months earlier, according to preliminary data from the Bank of Korea. Tan said South Korea’s per capita GDP could exceed US$30,000 in 2019, compared with $27,000 in 2016.
