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| Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon, right, has a talk with Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha while participating in a meeting of the Special Committee on Budget and Accounts at the National Assembly in Seoul, Monday. Yonhap |
By Lee Min-hyung
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has introduced additional spending to its budget for next year to be used to strengthen diplomacy with Japan amid a worsening row over trade and history issues.
The ministry said Thursday it would submit a budget of 2.74 trillion won ($2.2 billion) to the National Assembly early next month. The amount is up 11.5 percent from the previous year, and the largest increase in five years.
The ministerial budget is part of the government's overall spending plan for next year.
Some 5.1 billion won will be spent to "enhance diplomatic outreach and activities from South Korean official residences in Japan," the ministry said, a huge increase of 330 percent from this year.
"The decision reflects a willingness to keep contacting the Japanese public by strengthening diplomacy there," an official from the ministry said. "This is aimed at sharing the South Korean government's viewpoints in a clear manner with the Japanese public by expanding networking channels there."
The Japan-related budget will be used by diplomats in Japan to establish networks with local governments there, to explain South Korea's policies more systematically.
The move comes at a time when the two neighboring countries are intensifying their feud by imposing a series of hardline measures against each other.
The months-long dispute began after Seoul's Supreme Court ruled last October that Japanese companies should compensate surviving South Koreans forced to work for the firms during Japan's 1910-45 colonial rule of Korea.
It intensified Wednesday when Japan's decision to remove the South from a whitelist of trusted trading partners took effect, despite of requests and calls from Seoul to withdraw the apparent "retaliatory measure" to the court ruling.
The foreign ministry also decided to spend 1.7 billion won to deal with the aftermath of the growing external political uncertainty stemming from the year-long trade war between the United States and China.
Most of the budget will be used for new policies to minimize the impact on the country from the intensifying trade tension between the world's two largest economies.
The trade war between Washington and Beijing is making headlines across the world amid concerns that the deepening dispute will cause a global recession. South Korea, whose exports are heavily reliant on the two countries, is likely to be hit hard by this.
The ministry also increased spending for public diplomacy with the so-called "big four" countries ― the U.S., China, Japan and Russia ― to 7.2 billion won, up 166 percent from this year.
This highlights the growing importance of diplomatic relations with the key strategic countries, the foreign ministry said.
On the same day, the Ministry of Unification also unveiled its 1.43 trillion budget for 2020, up 6.5 percent from a year earlier.
Most of this will be put into the Inter-Korean Cooperation Fund. The unification ministry has been managing the fund since it was established in 1991 under the goal of enhancing inter-Korean ties.
The ministry said it allocated 1.22 trillion won of this into running the fund. In particular, the budget will be used for inter-Korean reconciliatory projects, such as the reconnection of cross-border railways. This was agreed between President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un during their first historic summit in April last year when inter-Korean relations were rosy.
But it remains to be seen whether the two Koreas will be able to accomplish the projects, as dialogue has been suspended following Kim's failed summit with U.S. President Donald Trump last February.
The breakdown of the Hanoi summit had a negative impact on inter-Korean relations, with the North recently resuming its missile tests, as part of a show of discontent over its failed nuclear negotiations with the U.S.
