The South Korean government plans to allocate 504.4 billion won ($455.5 million) for joint cross-border projects with Pyongyang next year, an increase of 43 percent from 2018, local media reported on Tuesday, citing an official from South Korea's Unification Ministry.
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 28th August, 2018) The South Korean government plans to allocate 504.4 billion won ($455.5 million) for joint cross-border projects with Pyongyang next year, an increase of 43 percent from 2018, local media reported on Tuesday, citing an official from South Korea's Unification Ministry.
According to the Hankook Ilbo newspaper, the money will be spent, in particular, on modernizing the roads and railways of the two Koreas.
Moreover, South Korean authorities expected to allocate 8.3 trillion won toward supporting the work of a joint coordination bureau in the Kaesong industrial zone on the North Korean side of the border, the newspaper added.
The total budget of South Korea's Unification Ministry that handles the inter-Korean affairs was expected to reach 1.3 trillion won next year, almost 11 percent higher than the 2018 budget, the newspaper noted.
The Unification Ministry said in late June that Seoul and Pyongyang would start a series of talks on bilateral cross-border projects in forestry and railway services in a follow-up to the historic inter-Korean summit in April.
