According to Yonhap News,

(SEJONG=Yonhap News) South Korea will ease additional regulations governing the country's free economic zones as part of efforts to boost foreign direct investment (FDI), the government said Wednesday.

"The government will remove the remaining red tape to help transform free economic zones into a stronghold for foreign investment while also improving their working conditions to ensure the inflow of advanced and trained workers," the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy said in a press release.

The latest measures were approved at an economy-related ministers' meeting held in Seoul.

They also follow a series of deregulation measures aimed at attracting more foreign investment, which included raising a ceiling on the foreign ownership of an aviation maintenance and operations firm in an free economic zone to 100 percent from 50 percent.

Under Wednesday's steps, the government will increase the allowed ratio of foreign employees to the total workforce to 30 percent from the current 20 percent at any given firm in free economic zones.

Such a limit on the number of foreign workers is designed to create more jobs for local laborers, but it often creates difficulties for foreign employers in finding local workers who are able to speak their language, the ministry said.

The government will also revise related regulations to allow businesses in free economic zones to submit their import-export related reports via e-mail, instead of hard copy.

Such measures will help boost the country's FDI to over US$20 billion for the first time in its history, the ministry said.

In the first seven months of the year, new FDI pledged to the country shrank 5.2 percent from the same period last year to $10.78 billion, according to the ministry.

The amount, however, marks the second-highest for the cited period in the country's history.

In 2014, new FDI pledges spiked 30.6 percent on-year to reach a record high of $19 billion with the amount of new FDI arriving here also surging 17.1 percent to a new high of $11.52 billion.

bdk@yna.co.kr

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