Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and Gangwon Province hold growth engine strategy forum
The government's "5-Pole, 3-Special" initiative will succeed only if investment, infrastructure and residential conditions are bundled together as a single package, participants at a strategy forum said Tuesday.
The "5-Pole, 3-Special Growth Engine" policy is the current government's flagship regional balanced-growth initiative. It aims to nurture key industries driving the economies of four broad super-regions and three special autonomous zones while shifting the country's industrial structure away from a Greater Seoul-centered model toward a multi-polar national growth system.
Participants at the "5-Pole, 3-Special Growth Engine Strategy Forum," jointly hosted by Gangwon Special Self-Governing Province and the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy at the Gangwon Information and Culture Industry Promotion Institute on Tuesday, said simply designating regions is not enough — realistic alternatives for work and daily life must follow.
Attendees broadly agreed that nurturing the 5-Pole, 3-Special growth engines should not stop at selecting industries, but must connect each region's future economic drivers to national strategy and tie together corporate investment, talent development, research and development, infrastructure and residential conditions into one package.
Yeo Jung-hyeop, administrative vice governor of Gangwon Special Self-Governing Province, called the initiative "an important turning point for linking the region's future economic drivers to national policy and bundling corporate investment, talent development, research and development, infrastructure and residential conditions into a single package." He added that the province would work closely with the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy to ensure the industries most needed by Gangwon are selected and supported in line with the province's industrial policy under the ninth elected administration.
The forum was organized to advance the development of regional growth engines, a core task under the "5-Pole, 3-Special" balanced-growth strategy. Representatives from the Korea Institute for Advancement of Technology, the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade, local municipalities, universities, research institutions and businesses attended to discuss ways to cultivate future growth engines based on Gangwon Province's industrial conditions and growth potential.
The government plans to support each region's capacity for self-sustaining growth by aligning policy tools around the designated regional growth engines. Those tools include corporate investment, research and development, workforce training, infrastructure, finance and fiscal support, and regulatory exemptions.
The forum covered a broad range of topics, including the development direction of candidate industries for Gangwon's growth engine, strategies for building innovation ecosystems by sector, measures to attract corporate investment and support business settlement in the region, talent development through university and research institution partnerships, and strategies for linking regional efforts to government support projects.
Gangwon Province said it plans to use the forum as a springboard to translate the province's industrial potential into concrete growth strategies and contribute actively to the successful implementation of the 5-Pole, 3-Special policy as it works to diversify South Korea's industrial map.
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