A former Standard & Poor's official said Tuesday South Korea's economy remains stable due to its solid fundamentals, though North Korean provocations have emerged as a major threat.
In a Seoul seminar arranged by the Federation of Korean Industries (FKI), John Chambers, former chairman of Standard & Poor's sovereign ratings committee, said South Korea's fundamentals are solid enough to cushion the impact from outside factors.
He said the Korean economy is robust in terms of trade balance, fiscal status and real-sector economy though the country faces a variety of negative outside factors.
Chambers picked China's economic hard landing, renegotiations of the free trade agreement with the United States and continued nuclear and missile threats from North Korea as the factors.
In the same seminar, former United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon called on South Korean companies to focus on their businesses as South Korea and its major ally the U.S. overwhelm the North in military preparedness.
He said the alliance between Seoul and Washington will work as a strong deterrent to the North's provocations though he acknowledged Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions have put the Korean peninsula almost "at the most dangerous point."
North Korea conducted its sixth and apparently most powerful nuclear test so far on Sept. 3. The communist state has also staged 10 missile provocations since the Moon Jae-in administration took office in May with at least two of them involving intermediate or long-range ballistic missiles.
