SEOUL: The South Korean government plans to increase its spending for next year by 5.3% in order to help boost the economy and stabilize the livelihood of ordinary people, the finance ministry said Tuesday.
According to the budget proposal to be presented to the parliament for approval, the government seeks to spend a total of 342.5 trillion won (US$306 billion) for next year, up from 325.4 trillion won set aside for 2012.
"We worked hard to come up with necessary measures to support the fiscal role at a time when it was difficult to increase fiscal spending significantly due to a toughening revenue-raising environment," the ministry said.
"The government expanded fiscal spending as much as possible within the overall direction of maintaining a budget balance," it added.
For health, welfare and labor affairs, the government assigned 97.1 trillion won, up 4.8% from this year. It also plans to spend 49.1 trillion in education, up 7.9% from this year, according to South Korea's (Yonhap) News Agency.
Spending on national defense will also increase 5.1% to 34.6 trillion won, while the government earmarked 4.1 trillion won for foreign relations and reunification, up 5% from this year, according to the ministry.
To strengthen the nation's growth potential, the spending plan calls for 16.9 trillion won to be used on research and development, 5.3% more than the amount set aside this year.
The government plans to increase expenditure on social infrastructure by 3.6% to 23.9 trillion won.
Meanwhile, the 2013 budget plan is based on the premise that the nation's economy will expand 4% next year.
This is lower than the government's earlier 4.3% growth projection in June, but still relatively optimistic compared with what may experts have expected. It also kept its earlier growth forecast for this year at 3.3%.
Based on the forecast, the ministry predicted that it will bring in 373.1 trillion won in tax revenue next year, up 8.6% from this year.
Gross national tax income is expected to gain 5.2% to 216.4 trillion won.
The ministry expects income tax revenue to amount to 50.6 trillion won next year, up 5.4 trillion from the estimate for this year. Corporate tax income is expected to grow by 0.5 trillion won on-year to 48 trillion won, according to the ministry. (QNA)
