Korea's economy grew two percent in 2019, only beating forecasts of even slower growth due to massive pump-priming in the fourth quarter of last year.

It was the lowest GDP growth since 2009's 0.8 percent right after the global financial crisis and falls short even of Korea's measly potential growth rate of 2.5 to 2.6 percent. The Bank of Korea on Wednesday that Korea's GDP totaled W1,844 trillion last year, up two percent from a year earlier (US$1=W1,165).

Some doomsayers had projected 0.9 percent growth for the fourth quarter and an annual growth rate of 1.9 percent. But the central government leaned on regional governments to implement massive pump-priming, causing growth to rise slightly higher.

The private sector therefore accounted for only 0.5 percentage points of the growth and the public sector for the rest. Construction investment fell 3.3 percent and facilities investment a steep 8.1 percent, so even the paltry growth was mostly due to taxpayer' money.

The central and regional governments spent a record W79 trillion from October to December on new infrastructure projects, but critics said that did not strengthen the country's economic fundamentals and merely patched up the figures.

