In February 2014, President Park Geun-hye unveiled a three-year economic reform plan to mark the first anniversary of her inauguration. She vowed to raise Korea’s potential growth rate to 4 percent by 2017, noting that without her plan, the rate might drop to the low end of the 3 percent range by that year.

Earlier this month, Bank of Korea Gov. Lee Ju-yeol estimated the national economy’s potential growth rate for this year at 3.2 percent. Lee offered the figure on the sidelines of a meeting of the G20 finance ministers and central bank governors in Lima, Peru.

Lee’s estimate did not attract much attention. But it was alarming -- not because it implied that Park’s three-year revitalization plan has failed, but because it suggested that Korea’s growth potential has been weakening at a pace much faster than forecast.

In July, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development put Korea’s potential growth rate for this year at 3.66 percent, projecting that it would fall to 3.15 percent in 2020.

The figure Lee offered was significantly lower than the 3.8 percent presented by his predecessor Kim Joong-soo in 2012. Korea’s potential growth slowed by up to 0.6 percentage points over the past three years.

If the trend continues, the rate is expected to fall to the 2 percent range in 2017 rather than shoot up above 4 percent, as anticipated by Park.

What’s worse, the Korean economy is expected to expand by a mere 2.7 percent this year, underperforming its weakened growth potential. This woeful growth pattern has been repeated for years, implying the national economy is caught in a low growth trap.

Low growth is the root cause of many social and economic problems that Korea faces. If the economy grows fast, it will set in motion a virtuous circle in which output growth stimulates consumption by boosting household income and the government’s tax revenue.

The incumbent government is having difficulty financing its welfare pledges due to a significant drop in tax revenue. To keep its election pledges, it has incurred debt, which erodes the nation’s fiscal soundness.

For a country like Korea that relies heavily on external trade, maintaining fiscal health is a must if it wants to steer clear of frequent global financial crises.

All this illustrates the importance of pulling the Korean economy out of a low-growth trap. Rescuing the trapped economy requires long-term efforts to beef up the nation’s growth potential and demolish the structural impediments to growth.

Korea’s smart economic officials all know well what it takes to strengthen the nation’s growth potential. The task calls for expanding human and physical capital stock, creating jobs to help more people engage in economic activities and promoting innovation to accelerate productivity improvement. 

The problem is that economic officials cannot do all these things alone. They need to enlist the support of lawmakers to put their plans into action.

It is the same with structural reforms. The incumbent government has been pushing for reform in four vital areas -- the public sector, labor, finance and education. But it cannot move forward without the cooperation of opposition parties.

Now lawmakers have started their deliberation of the 2016 budget bill. While meticulously examining the government’s budget proposal, they are also strongly urged to discuss various reform bills that have been waiting for their action. They need to realize that the time for economic reform is long overdue.