Deputy Prime Minister Choi supports small business owners and tourism

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Strategy and Finance visited the Jeju Small Business Support Center and Seogwipo Gangjeong Cruise Port to inspect the progress of small business and tourism support measures and listen to opinions. This comprehensive measure for small business owners was prepared to focus on alleviating the debt burden and cost burden, which are the biggest difficulties for small business owners, as well as ensuring a solid comeback through employment and re-startup. Recently, small business owners have been struggling with financial costs due to the increased loan size and high interest rates since the COVID-19. Deputy Prime Minister Choi said that he plans to continue to listen carefully to the voices of small business owners and make improvements. He visited Gangjeong Port and checked the status of cruise tourism and immigration screening. Cruise tourism has recently grown rapidly, with 310,000 people visiting from January to May this year, and Gangjeong Port is emerging as a center for cruise tour. However, when thousands of people enter the country at the same time, it takes an average of 3 to 4 hours to go through immigration, so if the docking time is 8 hours, the tourist stay time is only about 4 to 5 hours. Accordingly, Choi announced that he would install unmanned automatic immigration screening stations starting next year.

A delivery apps and members’ council opens

A delivery apps and members’ council was established to come up with a reasonable plan to ease the burden on store owners. The Council is comprised of four major delivery platforms and four associations and organizations representing store runners, and a total of 16 members include public interest members and special members. At the launching ceremony, they freely discussed how to operate a win-win council, ease the burden of fees, increase transparency, improve unfair practices, public delivery apps, institutional measures, and resolve difficulties. The council will work to deliver its findings in October, with the aim of resolving merchants' difficulties as quickly as possible. To increase the density of discussions in a short period of time, the government will organize meetings between delivery platforms and merchants as often as possible.