Budgetary politics in the National Assembly of South Korea: who gets what from legislative budgets?

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper attempts to shed light on budgetary politics in the National Assembly of South Korea by examining what we call a legislative budget. For analytical purposes, a legislative budget is defined as an increased or newly added budget at the comprehensive review stage of the Special Committee on Budget and Accounts. Using budget review reports from FY 2012 to FY 2015, we analyzed who benefits from legislative budgets and what types of policies and budgets are prioritized in legislative budgets. The results show that budgets for public agencies and a variety of institutions in the private sector prevailed over national and local budgets and that budgets for distributive policy accounted for an overwhelmingly larger portion than budgets for regulatory and redistributive policy. The study also finds that the ruling party and its home region secured more legislative budgets than the opposition parties and their regions.