It will be for the first time since the Asian financial crisis of 1997 that the South Korean economy may shrink during the first half of the coming year! Yonhap news agency reports say President Lee Myung-Bak has expressed apprehension that the country's economy could also "hit bottom in the first half", before it rebounds in the second half of the next year.

Before he received government policy briefings at the presidential Blue House, Lee remarked that it was only the South Korean economy that would suffer - the deepening economic crisis worldwide would have a profound affect on most countries. Terming the first two quarters of next year as the "trough of the economic cycle", Lee said that few countries would register positive economic growth during this period.

Moreover, with South Korea's high dependence on international markets, Lee, talking about the country's growth forecasts, said: "For the whole of 2009, we might achieve positive economic growth, but we might suffer an economic contraction in the first and second quarters." On December 16, the South Korean government cut its economic growth forecast for 2009 by one percentage point to three percent.

The Bank of Korea nevertheless appears to be a little more optimistic than the President, considering its latest forecast of a 0.6 percent and 3.3 percent growth respectively in the first and second half of 2009.

In its Outlook and Policy Outline for 2009, the Ministry of Strategy and Finance too expected next year's growth to be "more or less three percent," in comparison to 3.6 percent in 2008.