2020, Vol.29, No.2

Journal of Regulation Studies 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.78

pISSN : 1738-7132
https://journal.kci.go.kr/ksrs2002

Regulatory reform in Korea has been one of the major policy agendas of all the successive governments since 1990s. Represented by the Presidential Regulatory Reform Committee(RRC) which was established in 1998, the innovative feature of the current Korean system is to have introduced a permanent system of reform by creating a permanent office in the Prime Minister’s Office to control and monitor the quality of regulations. This implies the regulatory reform in Korea has become a permanent part of the government function, in contrast to the unsuccessful policy of regulatory reform of the 1980s which was transient and advisory. Despite the 30 years of reform, the current state of Korean regulation is not improving and actually getting worse, although the Korean regulatory reform system itself has been recommended as best practice by various international organizations, such as OECD and the World Bank. Therefore, it can be argued that the problem of the currently regretable state of Korean regulation is caused by the poor implementation of the good system. In this paper, I argue that the fundamental problem of Korean regulations is the poor quality of the regulations not the quantity, and that it is important to focus on the quality aspects of the regulations to minimize the compliance cost of the regulatees. The key factors that determine regulatory quality are discussed, and the causes of the deterioration of Korean regulatory quality are analyzed. Finally, it is recommended that there should be a quality control mechanism in the legislative branch, the National Assembly, where currently there is no such mechanism, and that the Regulatory Reform Committee should be revitalized to function as effective quality control center within the administrative branch of the government.

Despite the policy implication of the relationship between government regulations and public trust in government, the direction of the relationship has not been clearly discussed as regulatory policies are both a means and an outcome. Will easing the level of government regulations through regulatory reform increase public trust in government? Or will the level of government regulation increase as trust in government increases? This study seeks to find implications for the future direction of regulatory reform through an empirical analysis of the relationship between government regulations and trust in government. To this end, a total of six government regulatory indices and trust indices were used to conduct a panel regression analysis for 37 OECD countries from 1998 to 2020. As a main result of the analysis, the level of trust in government increases as the level of government regulation is eased. There is also a possibility of a virtuous cycle of regulatory reforms which shows that the increase in the trust level caused by a decrease in the regulatory level will lead to a decline in the level of regulations again. However, some analysis results show that an increase in the trust level may lead to a rise in the government regulation level, making it difficult to come to a clear conclusion regarding the impact of trust in government on regulations. Nevertheless, when looking at the impact of regulations on trust in government, relaxation of regulations through active regulatory reform may elicit a positive effect with regard to enhancing public trust in the government. This suggests that regulatory reforms are needed not only to revitalize the economy but also to enhance public trust in government.

This paper explores to find key areas and properties of local government regulations (LGRs) in Korea. It applies text network analysis (TNA) for 34,800 registered regulations from the ‘Regulation Information Portal’ with centrality analysis, sociogram and quasi-network. Both 'National-Urban Development' and 'Environment' are found to be key areas of LGRs. The major words are 'building' for 'National-Urban Development' and 'waste' and 'food' for 'Environment'. They are different between the areas and types, and between the delegated and autonomous regulations. The following policy implications are suggested based on the empirical findings. First, the lead agent of each LGR is necessary to separate clearly because duplicated regulations among the local governments are supposed to hinder local autonomy. Second, the central government is required to cover workforce for making LGRs more reasonable which does not have enough specialty for enforcing them. Third, it is better for the central government to allow local governments to enforce their regulations autonomously within delegation of law which allows local governments to respond the policy demands of locals more efficiently. Fourth, it is required to make efforts to reduce the ‘searching cost’ for regulation standards among local governments. Because the industries subject to regulations have troubles with finding each individual regulation by local governments where they have different standards,