MOCIE Extends Trustworthy Certifi -cate Project
- Support fund increased to 490 bln won until 2011

The Ministry of Commerce, Industry, and Energy (MOCIE) has decided to extend its trustworthy assurance project to 2011 with an increase in support funding to the project to 490 billion won, Kim Dong-soo, head of the ministry's capital goods section, said recently.
The project would have been completed in June this year with 161.5 billion won in support funding since it was kicked off in 2000.
Section head Kim said it is too much to rely solely on the private sector to carry on with the project, as it needs a large fund and a high-degree of technology. He went on to say that the government is ready to go as far as revising the parts and material professional enterprise fostering special law to extend the project period to 2011 with an increase in support funding in the amount of 490 billion won during 2005-2011. The revised plan is designed to upgrade Korea's trustworthiness to the level of advanced countries (95 percent by 2011). For reference, the value of a Korean car depreciates by 24.1 percent after a year of ownership compared to 3.2 percent for a Japanese car in the U.S. car market.
Kim said the government would continue to work on developing the infrastructure and system with trustworthiness based on results of the project thus far. He said first of all, the procedure for attaining the certificate would be simplified to the extent that customers would feel at ease as time needed to attain the certificate would be shortened. The project would now be geared to joint projects between large corporations and subcontractors to upgrade trustworthiness between them. The project will also include the analysis of trustworthiness centered on parts and material export firms.
The government invested a total of 161.5 billion won from 2000 to build an infrastructure for parts and material including those for the evaluation of trustworthiness, securing evaluation instruments and fostering needed professional workers. As of September this year, the government set up a total of 258 cases of standards of trustworthiness and presented 154 cases of the trustworthiness certificates to 127 firms.
As such, the sales of those products with certified trustworthiness doubled as of the end of last year. Around 55 firms, which obtained the certificates, saw its sales jump from 97.9 billion won before receiving the certificates to 202.8 billion won after receiving the certificates.
At the same time, the government carried out the trustworthiness upgrade support project from the development stages of a product. The government also started the coverage of insurance policies for trustworthy certified products to expand demand for such products. Last year, its first year, a total of 1.5 trillion won worth of insurance policies were provided to the products of 11 firms with the trustworthy certificates and this year up to the end of September, 1.56 trillion won worth of insurance policies were provided to 14 firms with trustworthy certificates.
In the meantime, Korea's trade deficit with Japan swelled to nearly 16 billion during the first eight months of this year, triggering fears that it could continue to climb to new highs for the rest of the year.
The government largely attributed the widening gap between exports and imports to the jump in precision machinery, industrial electronic goods, and steel products from Japan.
The volume of imported equipment for manufacturing mobile communication goods and semiconductors, Korea's top export items, also nearly doubled during the period.
Korea is a prime destination for Japanese goods with shipments from the country during the first eight months of the year accounting for 21.2 percent of imports, surpassing the combined figure from the four fastest-growing economies in the world-Brazil, Russia, India and China.
An upcoming free-trade agreement with Japan could signal a further rise in the trade deficit with Japan. The removal of tariffs and trade barriers would give Japan even greater access to the domestic market. nw