South Korea will expand its support for the country's service sector development by providing diverse incentives for investment and removing red-tape, the country's top economic policymaker said Tuesday.

"We will provide every possible tax and budget support for research and development investment in the service sector in a way that creative workers and ideas can spring up," Finance Minister Hyun Oh-seok said during a seminar on how to enhance the competitiveness of the service sector.

"In addition, we will actively find regulations deemed to be hampering its development and push to ease or remove such red-tape," he added.

The minister also said that the government will unveil a set of measures aimed at helping and boosting the country's service sector by the end of May.

The service sector currently accounts for 70 percent of the country's total employment and 60 percent of its gross domestic product, but Hyun said that its competitiveness still remains far below other advanced countries.

He added that the number of younger people employed in the service sector is on the decline.

"In order to enhance the overall added value in the service sector and create jobs for younger people, we need to break away from the existing framework and upgrade it to a creative one," he said.

"To that end, we need to nurture new service businesses such as digital content and global health care that require a higher level of creativity," he added.

Source: Yonhap News (Apr. 23, 2013)