The 1st Korea-US Infrastructure Cooperation Working Group Meeting... Public-Private Roundtable Held

[Asia Economy Reporter Kwangho Lee] On the 3rd, the Ministry of Economy and Finance announced that it held the 1st Working Group Meeting and Public-Private Roundtable for Korea-US infrastructure cooperation at the Conrad Hotel in Yeouido, Seoul.

At the meeting, the Korean side was represented by the Director General of the External Economic Policy Bureau of the Ministry of Economy and Finance as the chief representative, and the US side was represented by the Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Markets of the US Department of the Treasury.

This Working Group meeting is the first official meeting held since Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy and Finance Hong Nam-ki and US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin signed the "Korea-US Infrastructure Cooperation Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)" in Washington DC, USA, last October.

The roundtable invited stakeholders from the public and private sectors and was a forum to seek substantial progress in specific projects based on the infrastructure cooperation foundation agreed upon in the morning.

At the Working Group meeting, concrete cooperation plans were agreed upon in areas such as discovering joint infrastructure projects and developing infrastructure-related financial markets, which the working-level officials of both countries have discussed since the MOU was signed last year.

Both countries discussed a list of projects of interest for joint entry into third countries and explored ways to form project consortia in the future.

They also derived future cooperation directions, including financial cooperation measures to activate infrastructure loans and institutional improvement tasks to promote mutual investment between the two countries.

At the subsequent roundtable, discussions were held on ways to develop infrastructure finance, such as actively utilizing private capital to close the infrastructure investment gap in the global infrastructure market.

In particular, the US Department of the Treasury presented for the first time its ideas and plans for infrastructure financial cooperation targeting domestic public and financial institutions and construction companies, and active participation and discovery of cooperative projects by Korean and US private companies are expected in the future.

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