BOK’s Kim looks back at his 2 years in office

Bank of Korea governor Kim Choong-soo will be celebrating his second anniversary as the head of the nation’s central bank on April 1. In advance, the BOK released a report reviewing its performance under Kim and the governor’s vision for the future, which stressed global cooperation, good macroeconomic policies, openness and internal innovation.

The report said one of its major achievements under Kim was revising the Bank of Korea legislation, which granted the central bank a larger role in stabilizing the financial industry.

As a veteran economist, Kim has stressed that post-economic crisis conditions have increased the importance of prudence in macroeconomic policies.

“As the economy is becoming more globalized, interconnectedness among countries is getting deeper, while policies of each nation are bidirectional - not unidirectional as they were in the past,” the report stated.

It noted that the central bank in the past two years has focused on stabilizing consumer price while maintaining growth in the post-economic crisis era through detailed analysis of financial and economic risk factors at home and from abroad. The BOK said its normalization of exchange rates was in the middle range when compared to a range of other economies from India to the U.S.

The report said it will strengthen its efforts to stabilize the economy by establishing an emergency countermeasure system while enhancing “two-way” communication with the markets at home and abroad.

By Lee Ho-jeong [ojlee82@joongang.co.kr]