South Korea’s central bank and the MNB hold a joint specialist conference

25 June 2024

Deputy Governor of the MNB Barnabás Virág opened the latest in a series of the MNB’s and the Bank of Korea’s (BoK) joint workshop conferences held this year in Budapest. The main theme of the event entitled ‘Digital Money and Green Economy: New Challenges for Central Banks’ is the active sharing of knowledge between the two institutions in areas posing new technical challenges such as digital finance and sustainable economic transition.

This year, the Hungarian and Korean central banks organised the second event in their joint workshop conference series entitled ‘Digital Money and Green Economy: New Challenges for Central Banks’. Barnabás Virág, Deputy Governor of the MNB and Taehyoung Cho, Director General of the BoK’s Economic Research Institute (BoK ERI) held speeches at the workshop.

In his welcome speech, Barnabás Virág highlighted that this event provided an excellent opportunity for the exchange of experiences, as in many aspects the two countries faced similar challenges. Adapting successfully these challenges – including demographic processes and the incentivisation of a digital, carbon neutral economy – required joint reflection and the accumulation of knowledge capital.

In his speech, Taehyoung Cho stressed the importance of efficient technical dialogue between the institutions since 2019. He added that the event provided an opportunity to strengthen professional ties for the second time now. In September 2023, the BoK ERI hosted the MNB’s delegation in Seoul during the first event in the conference series.

At this year’s event in Budapest, a total of fifteen speakers, divided into four thematic sections, shared their experiences with the audience. This time, the expert dialogue took on an even more crucial role, as participants could ask questions about South Korea’s and Hungary’s macroeconomic prospects, demographic challenges, and current initiatives related to digital central bank currency and green money. One of the key topics of the exchange of ideas was the MNB’s sustainability metrics (sustainable GDP), on which the Bank published a global discussion paper in March this year.

Studies were contributed to last year’s MNB-BOK workshop conference. These will be published by the Bank of Korea in a joint conference report on the occasion of this year’s event.