Gyeonggi Province has begun to revise its trade, investment and diplomatic strategies to cope with rising global protectionism amongst China’s strengthening of non-tariff barriers and the US withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP).

Gyeonggi Province plans to establish and implement trade, investment, and diplomatic diversification strategies. These will feature export outlet diversification including the expansion of business budget investments to discover alternative markets as well as the opening of new markets in connection with Official Development Assistance (ODA) projects.

More specifically, Gyeonggi Province will review 25 existing China-related export and cooperation projects and make changes in 10 of them so as to diversify through the targeting of other foreign markets. With this, it will increase the limit of provincial export subsidies to reduce SME risk when entering foreign markets from KRW 1 million to 2 million for projects related to China. Additionally, it will raise the limit of the Chinese standard certification achievement support subsidy from KRW 10 million to 20 million so as to cope with that nation’s strengthened protectionism.

Gyeonggi Province will also accelerate the attraction of investments in response to the imminent Fourth Industrial Revolution. The province will undertake various measures such as export linkage, equity investment, technology alliances, and inter-regional cooperation, breaking away from existing one-way investment attraction strategies that simply provide sites and attract manufacturing facilities and R&D centers.

Meanwhile, in terms of diplomacy, Gyeonggi Province will propel strategic economic diplomacy for pioneering overseas markets and invigorating investment attraction as key strategies. Discarding traditional approaches focusing only on exchange and cooperation with local governments in each country, the province will promote strategic economic diplomacy with emerging and important regions in Southeast Asia and elsewhere so as to establish friendly relations and support corporate activities. This year, there are plans to discuss economic cooperation and human exchanges with the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and the government of Chiang Mai Province, Thailand, which are in Southeast Asia. In addition, Gyeonggi will form friendly relations with Central Asian and ASEAN countries by strategically linking ODA projects so as to indirectly support the pioneering of emerging markets.