SOUTH KOREAN INSURERS’ BAD DEBT RATIO FALLS

A PROGRAMME to recover overdue debts has led to an improvement in the bad debt ratio of South Korea’s insurers in the second quarter, official figures suggest. By the end of June the country’s life and non-life insurers had reduce the ratio by 0.5percetnage points to 1.9%, the South Korean Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) said. In a statement it explained: “"he improvement came as insurers made efforts to retrieve bad debts and beef up the management of them, which decreased the size of total bad loans." In total bad debts at the end of June were Won1.45trn compared with Won1.59trn a year ago.