2016, Vol.23, No.4

Korea Social Policy Review 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 2.47

pISSN : 1226-0525
https://journal.kci.go.kr/kasp

Korean society has in recent years witnessed ever increasing conflicts between the central and local governments regards to the social welfare functions. This has shown that it has been urgently necessary to redesign the institutional frameworks to allocate the welfare- related tasks between the central and local governments. A great many studies have submitted various suggestions, some theoretically focused and other practically focused, to enhance welfare decentralization institutions. This paper purported to provide an guideline to inform the direction for which various efforts to redesign the welfare decentralization institutions. For this purpose the paper tried to delineate the typologies of local government systems among 22 OECD countries including Korea and to compare these local government system types with the welfare state types. From this comparison this paper concluded that the Korean local government system can be classified into hybrid type and has some paternalistic characteristics in that control and intervention by the central government is higher than other countries under analysis. On this basis, the paper suggested that while there needs to reinforce the capacities of local governments, the supervision and control by the central government should be reduced.

This article aims at discussing how to restructure the governance of social services by introducing a discretion mix approach. The Korean government has rapidly developed social services over the last ten years. However, scholars have criticised the inefficiency problems arising partly from the marketisation and partly from the duplication and overlapping of existing programmes. On this issue, previous studies mostly focus on the configuration of service production using the welfare mix approach, but there has been little scholarly attention on the distribution of the decision-making power across policy actors. This study analyses issues of childcare services as a case by using the discretion mix approach. Discretion mix is defined as the distributive status of autonomy and power in social services, i.e. who gets what and how, across law, central and local governments, front-line managers, service providers, and service users. This article argues that the central government dominated discretion mix has caused the dilemma of producing tailor-made and efficient social services. Therefore, it argues that the discretion mix should be restructured by releasing and transferring the discretionary power of central government to smaller units including local governments, service providers, and service recipients.

This study investigates the characteristics of the relationship between central government and local government, between national politics and local politics during the past decade of welfare decentralization in South Korea after 2005. Main questions are: firstly, was the welfare decentralization in Korea a means of neoliberal welfare state retrenchment? Secondly, did the decentralization measures actually result in the weakening of the power of central government? Thirdly, did the local politics began to show independent political dynamics? For these questions, the size and share of social welfare expenditure of the central and local government, their historical trends, and the power structure of local government head and local parliament are analyzed. Major findings are as follows: firstly, the welfare decentralization in Korea did not mean welfare state retrenchment as both the central government and most local governments continued to increase the social welfare expenditure in the course of the welfare decentralization. Secondly, the welfare decentralization in Korea functioned as an institutional channel of the expansion of welfare policies of the central government into the local level, as the growth of the welfare expenditure in local governments depended largely upon the state subsidy programs and revenue-sharing system. Thirdly, the local power structure made a considerable impact on the welfare policy of local governments, but the national politics influenced the local power structure strongly through local elections.