By Lee Tae-hoon
In a National Assembly audit of Incheon on Monday, lawmakers argued that the country’s second largest port city, has failed to attract enough foreign investment to lay the foundation to become a commercial and business hub of Northeast Asia.
“Incheon has become an international city without foreigners,” Rep. Lee Myoung-su of the minor opposition Liberty Forward Party said, arguing the free economic zone (FEZ) designated in the city in 2003 has turned out to be a failure.
He said the amount of foreign direct investment (FDI) made in Incheon stood at only $730 million in the past seven years, about nine times lower than $6.7 billion that some of the media reported.
The legislator also noted that the proportion of foreigners in the Incheon FEZ is still too low to make it a vibrant international city.
“The proportion of foreigners has rather decreased from 3.2 percent in 2008 to 2.02 percent in June 2010,” he said, arguing most of them are simple laborers who came to Korea with a short-term work visa.
Lawmaker Lee also noted that several foreign universities which pledged to open their overseas campus in Songdo Global Campus in Incheon have indefinitely postponed or scrapped their plans.
“Incheon dreamed of a rosy picture of hosting top foreign universities, such as North Carolina State University and the State University of New York, which were expected to open from September this year,” he said.
Jang Se-hwan, a lawmaker of the main opposition Democratic Party, also slammed Incheon’s failure to attract foreign investment.
“Of the 40 memorandums of understandings that the city signed in the past five years, 15 of them have been cancelled,” he said.
Jang estimated that the completion of the Incheon FEZ will cost 46 trillion won ($41 billion).