Credit: Public domain.
According to the Bank of Korea 한국은행, South Korea’s economic growth in Q1 2025 is likely to be less than 0.1%, and potentially in the negative. This would mark four consecutive quarters in which the South Korean economy had a growth rate below 0.1%, or a full year of stagnation.
Even during major economic disasters, the South Korean economy has always managed to turn things around within a year. In the 1997 East Asian Financial Crisis, the economy contracted by 0.6% in Q4 1997 and by 6.7% in Q1 1998, but managed to return to 2.0% growth by Q3 1998. Similarly, the Korean economy shrank by 3.4% in Q4 2008 during the Global Financial Crisis, but rebounded to growth of 3.1% by Q3 2009.
