South Korea’s central bank expects its pandemic-hit economy to weaken further this year and kept its record-low policy rate unchanged as expected, in order to keep supporting growth amid simmering concerns about rising property prices.

The Bank of Korea’s policy board on 16 July unanimously kept its benchmark interest rate at 0.50%, a historic low reached with a rate cut in May when it also forecast that the economy would contract 0.2% this year. That contraction would be the economy’s weakest performance since the Asian Financial crisis more than two decades ago.