President Lee Jae Myung's approval rating rose last week after hitting its lowest level since his inauguration, a poll showed Friday. The survey, conducted by Gallup Korea from Tuesday through Thursday on 1,005 people aged 18 and older, showed that 54 percent of those polled approved of the way Lee managed state affairs, up 3 percentage points from a week earlier. Lee's handling of the economy and people's livelihoods was cited most frequently as the reason for the positive evaluation at 24 percent, followed by diplomacy at 14 percent and overall performance at 8 percent. Gallup said economic issues accounted for a larger share of the reasons cited for Lee's approval than a week earlier, while "balanced regional development" was newly mentioned among both positive and negative evaluations. The pollster partly attributed this to the government's recent announcement of the "three mega projects" initiative, which calls for large-scale investments by chip giants Samsung Electronics Co. and SK hynix Inc., as well as other companies, in semiconductors, physical artificial intelligence (AI) and