Seoul Metropolitan Government

The rating on Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) remains supported by its robust local economy that generates a high level of own-source revenues, prudent financial management and a supportive institutional framework. We expect SMG to rebound strongly from the COVID-19 pandemic, with robust export growth supporting its local economy. The government's strong record of delivering solid financial outcomes as well as the supportive local government system also underpin our views on SMG. Our ratings on SMG are constrained by our sovereign rating on Korea. SMG will run deficits after capital accounts in 2020 and 2021 but return to capital surpluses thereafter. SMG's budgetary performance has weakened as the city is deploying significant spending to support the local economy during the COVID-19

...Key rating factors Institutional framework 2 Economy 1 Financial management 2 Budgetary perfomance 1 Liquidity 1 Debt burden 1 Stand-alone credit profile ##+ Issuer credit rating ## S&P Global Ratings bases its ratings on non-U.S. local and regional governments (LRGs) on the six main rating factors in this table. In the "Methodology For Rating Local And Regional Governments Outside Of The U.S.," published on July 15, 2019, we explain the steps we follow to derive the global scale foreign currency rating on each LRG. The institutional framework is assessed on a six-point scale: 1 is the strongest and 6 the weakest score. Our assessments of economy, financial management, budgetary performance, liquidity, and debt burden are on a five-point scale, with 1 being the strongest score and 5 the weakest....

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