South Korean PM holds 2045 Strategy Committee meeting, selects 17 core tasks

Seoul, Aug 12 (AHN) The South Korean government held a second meeting on Wednesday of the 2045 Strategy Committee charged with drawing up a blueprint and strategies for what South Korea should look like in 2045 and identified 17 core tasks with the goal of announcing the final strategies by the end of the year, officials said.

The committee, launched in May, is aimed at developing long-term national development strategies to muster up national capabilities so as to deal systematically with hard-to-resolve challenges, such as polarisation, demographic changes, regional extinction and climate change.

The year 2045 carries a symbolic meaning as the centennial of Korea's liberation from Japan's 1910-45 colonial rule, reports Yonhap news agency.

"The 2045 national development strategy should be a strategy for all people, not just the government alone. What's more important than anything else is to collect wisdom from all people across generations," Prime Minister Han Seong-sook said while presiding over the committee's second meeting.

"We will try to select future-oriented, daring and challenging tasks to build an 'irreplaceable Republic of Korea' in every aspect by 2045, the 100th anniversary of the liberation," she said.

During the meeting, the National Research Council for Economics, Humanities and Social Sciences reported that South Korea faces a polycrisis involving AI transformation, demographic and climate crises, and geopolitical hegemony competition while trapped in a "double bottleneck" situation where top technologies do not lead to tangible outcomes, and there is a weak foundation for social consensus.

It called for redesigning the innovative growth engine and the social operating system to realise a future vision.

Seventeen priority tasks were selected during the meeting, including securing AI competitiveness, ensuring energy security, reforming pensions, welfare, and care systems for an ageing society, leveraging human resources across youth, women, and older generations, and promoting tech-friendly regulatory innovation, officials said.