27th ASEAN + 3 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governor's Meeting

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy and Finance Sangmok Choi chaired the 27th ASEAN + 3 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governor's Meeting held at Tbilisi, Capital of Georgia, on May 3. Officials of the 12 countries attended the meeting and discussed on economic trend, risk factors and financial cooperation. Choi praised the effort of the member countries to overcome the economic situations after the pandemic and they needed to keep an eye on exchange rate and financial market volatility. The members agreed to establishe a new RFF (Rapid Financing Facility) and to expand the currencies to FUC (Freely Usable Currency). In order to increase the effectiveness of CMIM, a multilateral currency swap, all member countries agreed on the benefits of changing the financial structure to a paid-up capital method. To make this concrete, it was agreed to analyze the pros and cons of various models and decide on a specific model by 2025.

57th Annual Meeting of the Asian Development Bank

Choi attended the 57th Annual Meeting of the Asian Development Bank held at Tbilisi from May 4 to 5. He briefed on international economy and development climate and gave his opinion on the development direction of the ADB by bringing up three factors: 1) Flexible and responsible ADB strategy as more roles and responsibilities of the ADB and MEB are required. He said that South Korea would be a founding member of the SCPPF to support the ADB. 2) Securing financial resources. He welcomed the ADB's 100 billion USD loan capacity and said that South Korea would back up 3 fold increase in the cooperate fund of the EDCF-ADB. 3) Operational model. He said that South Korea and the ADB decided to establish K-Hub for promotion of technology.