<Anchor> The



government is releasing the country's livelihood as an official document every month, but when you look closely, there is a problem with an important figure here.



It was confirmed by SBS coverage that two different standards were mixed to represent the 'national debt ratio', and detailed information is reported exclusively by reporter Jo Ki-ho.



<Reporter> This



is a monthly financial trend published by the Ministry of Strategy and Finance.



Over 70 pages, details of the country's household, such as income, expenses, and wealth, are disclosed both inside and outside the country.



Among them, there is a table that summarizes the national debt of major countries, including Korea, as announced by the OECD.



I checked to see if it was correct.



Korea's national debt in 2020 was written as 48.9% of GDP, but the actual OECD report was 45.4%.



Debt is 3.5%p higher.



The figures for previous years are all wrong.



As a result of the confirmation, the Ministry of Strategy and Finance used the figures for other countries as announced by the OECD, while only Korea's figures were replaced with data from the International Monetary Fund and the IMF.



The OECD uses figures calculated by the Bank of Korea and the IMF by the Ministry of Strategy and Finance. These two figures are mixed.



[Lee Sang-min / Senior Research Fellow, Nara Salim Research Institute: The OECD standard and the IMF standard are different in the statistical calculation method itself.

However, it is a statistical error to use these two criteria interchangeably.

If you make national statistics with this kind of wrong standard, no one can trust you.]



When I asked the Ministry of Finance for the reason, the explanation came back that there was no intention.



"I was only quoting the OECD because there was only the OECD that gave the global average for the national debt, and I did not know that it would cause a problem because Korea had different standards under the table," he said.



The Ministry of Strategy and Finance declined to show the figures of the OECD and the IMF in the future after the coverage, but it was criticized for treating sensitive economic figures in vain.



(Video coverage: Kim Min-cheol, video editing: Lee Seung-yeol)