The National Assembly Budget Office (Chief Dongha Chi) held its annual consultation with the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO) on Monday, December 15. AMRO is an international organization headquartered in Singapore, comprising ten ASEAN nations (Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Vietnam, Brunei, Singapore, Indonesia, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines), along with Korea, China, and Japan. The organization focuses on macroeconomic monitoring and crisis prevention in the region and conducts annual consultations with member countries to review their fiscal and economic trends.

Ahyoung Kwon, Director of Tax and Estimates Coordination Division, and Kian-Heng Peh, Group Head of AMRO Mission Team, led the meeting. The consultation covered several key topics, including NABO’s revenue and expenditure projections for 2025 and 2026, our overlook for fiscal balances and debt, current status on fiscal rules introduction for ensuring fiscal sustainability, reform plans for tax/pension/social insurance, and improvement measures for local finances.

The AMRO Mission team noted that "while we understand it would be difficult for Korea to introduce fiscal rules in the short term to curb debt growth, given the persistent upward trend in debt, there is a need to adopt fiscal rules and establish a debt ceiling in the medium to long term." NABO concurred with this view and proposed discussing the feasibility of introducing such measures in Korea while sharing examples of fiscal rule implementation from other countries that AMRO has studied.

Concluding the meeting, Group Head Kian-Heng Phe stated, "The experts at NABO have been tremendously helpful in understanding and forecasting Korea's fiscal and economic situation," and expressed his hope that "exchanges and cooperation between our two organizations will continue to deepen in the future."