SEOUL: South Korea's incoming president Lee Myung-Bak will offer impoverished communist North Korea a dramatic rise in living standards if it abandons all its nuclear programmes, his office said on Tuesday.

Lee's transition team, announcing policy goals for when he takes office on February 25, restated his pledge to raise the North's per capita income to 3,000 dollars within a decade if it denuclearises fully and opens its society.

The US State Department estimated the North's per capita gross national income at 914 dollars in 2004.

Liberal governments in Seoul over the past decade have followed a "sunshine" engagement policy with the North despite its missile launches and nuclear test.

Lee has promised a firmer line, saying he will seek greater reciprocity in relations and link aid more closely to denuclearisation.

In a statement, the team said the next government would significantly heighten transparency in the spending of the Inter-Korean Cooperation Fund.

The South Korean government has so far spent 5.18 trillion won (5.45 billion dollars) from the fund – 93 percent of this under the presidency of outgoing president Roh Moo-Hyun and his predecessor Kim Dae-Jung.

The Roh administration has decided to increase this year's budget for the fund by 50 percent to 700 billion won, prompting conservative civic activists to question where the money goes.

Lee has already announced plans to merge the unification ministry, which handles policy with the North, with the foreign ministry. He denies this means a downgrading of relations.

Six-nation talks on scrapping the North's nuclear programme in return for aid and diplomatic benefits are currently stalled.

The North missed a December 31 deadline to declare all its nuclear activities. It says it submitted a list in November but the US insists it must account fully for a suspected secret highly enriched uranium weapons programme.


- AFP/so