Kim Yong-beom, chief of the Presidential Policy Office, suggested that the semiconductor market's boom could generate record-breaking excess tax revenue and called for more flexible fiscal policy. Kim pointed out that macroeconomic policy judgments remain constrained by the limits of averaged and lagging statistics, even as Korea's economic landscape is being reshaped around the semiconductor industry.
Kim shared these views in a Facebook post titled "KOSPI at 7,500 and on the Threshold of 10,000." "The preliminary first-quarter GDP growth rate this year was 1.7%, nearly double the Bank of Korea's forecast of 0.9%, and the trade balance is setting record highs on a monthly basis," he said. "None of these are figures that come from an ordinary business cycle." He added that "the combined profits of Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) and SK hynix (000660.KS) alone, as estimated by Goldman Sachs, are on a scale that was difficult to imagine under the past sensibility of the Korean stock market."
Kim then pointed out the structural limitations that make it difficult to reflect rapidly changing market conditions and semiconductor-led growth patterns in fiscal and macroeconomic policy in real time. "Korea's fiscal and macroeconomic projections are fundamentally based on GDP growth forecasts, but this semiconductor boom has characteristics that the existing GDP framework struggles to capture," he said. Kim's concern is that "in industries like semiconductors, where the pace of quality improvement overwhelms price changes, the existing statistical system reflects changes in reality too slowly." The existing statistical system covers production performance across all industries beyond semiconductors and takes a long time to compile.
Kim suggested that the basis for fiscal policy decisions should extend beyond GDP to consider other statistics as well. "At this juncture, what most quickly reflects reality is the trade balance, export data, and corporate operating profits," he said. "The market is already moving based on those numbers, but policy is structurally forced to respond belatedly while waiting for confirmed GDP and finalized statistics." He also described this as "the structural limitation of governance, in which central banks, macroeconomic authorities, and budget authorities are all forced to lag behind the ultra-fast semiconductor-driven industrial cycle."
Kim predicted that if the semiconductor boom continues through next year, "record-breaking excess tax revenue could accumulate" this year and next. He emphasized that "how flexibly the policy system can absorb industrial changes on a scale that is difficult to explain within the existing framework" is what matters, adding that "relying solely on conventional methods could widen the margin of error in response." Finally, Kim suggested that "if a semiconductor-centered structural shift is indeed underway, fiscal policy also needs to break free from thinking tied to past average values and take a more flexible and broader perspective."
