South Korea Bets on ‘Untact’ for the Post-Pandemic Economy

South Korea is making a national push to reshape its economy around a concept called “untact.” Developed by a group of local consumer science gurus in 2017, untact envisions a future where people increasingly interact online and companies replace humans with machines to immunize themselves against the effects of rising wages and a rapidly aging workforce.

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, that future became the present: Untact has become a key plank of President Moon Jae-in’s 76 trillion won ($62 billion) “New Deal” program. The name is of course a nod to the patchwork of stimulus measures that helped the U.S. overcome the Great Depression. While South Korea hasn’t experienced a slump of that magnitude, economic growth has been sluggish in recent years, averaging 2.9% a year since 2010, compared with 4.4% annually from 2000 to 2009. The government anticipates growth of 0.1% in 2020, but the central bank and private economists are forecasting a contraction, the first since the Asian financial crisis in the 1990s.