In the midst of increasing pressure on the budget allocation for the welfare demand, governments encountered the global financial crisis in 2008 which intensified the necessity to squeeze the expenditure on the social services. In this kind of social ...
In the midst of increasing pressure on the budget allocation for the welfare demand, governments encountered the global financial crisis in 2008 which intensified the necessity to squeeze the expenditure on the social services. In this kind of social and political backdrop, an interesting experiment of the UK’s social policy named as ‘Social Impact Bond’ got a spotlight from the global community. It quickly spread out to the different areas of social services within the UK and then to the different countries such as the United States, Australia and other European countries without much delay. Even in Korea, the two local governments, Seoul Metropolitan City Government and Kyunggi Provincial government, launched a SIB of their own for group home children and beneficiaries of basic subsidy from the government.
Having defined the concept of the SIB as a‘combination of the social policy and social investment by project financing’, this paper made a comparative analysis on the operating structure of SIB between Korea where the SIB has just piloted and UK and USA where the SIB has already positioned as a social policy. The advantages and disadvantages, as well as differences and similarities found in the comparative analysis are as follows.
First, there are differences in the role of government as a policy initiator. While the UK established an SIB supporting system along with SIB payment funds and SIB supporting funds on the level of the central government, the US lacks of active efforts for securing budget such as SIB payment funds except SIB legislations. Korean government has made no actions regarding SIB but Seoul City government and Kyunggi provincial government are playing active roles in launching SIB projects.
Second, the UK and the US have a wide range of the social institutions having proven preventive solutions and able intermediaries for SIB. In Korea, there are intermediaries for the Seoul and Kyunggi SIB but they are very young and newly established.
Third, The UK government shortened the payment intervals within the scheme of the multi-layer contracts for SIB operation through the SIB payment funds by simplifying the performance indicators, which relieves financial burdens for the private investors. But the US and Korea have no SIB payment funds.
Fourth, the US has investors for SIBs from retail and investment banking sector. But investors for SIBs in the UK and Korea are mostly from non profit organizations and social financial institutions.
Fifth, there are differences in the legislations for SIB. The UK provides indirect legal backups, other than direct SIB legislations, for the SIB operations by the legislations that stipulated considering the social values in any social service contracts between government and social institutions. But the US and Korea have established direct legislations for SIB payments.
The policy implications drawn out of the comparative analysis are as follows.
First, the central government needs to initiate SIB policy making process. In Korea, two local governments individually made an effort to launch a SIB but it would have been more helpful if they had gotten supports from the central government in terms of choosing the target social area, budget allocation, and legislative backup. The central government needs to carefully select the most appropriate area for the application of SIB through a full research. In addition, it is necessary to form a consensus on the need of setting up SIB support funds. In case the budget and expenditure of a certain social service involve both local and central government, the local government alone may have difficulties to pay for the success of the project. Furthermore, a tax incentive system needs to be prepared to attract private funds to this kind of social projects.
Second, Korean society lacks of capable social intermediaries and service providers equipped with proven intervention programs in various social areas. Shifting from the conventional focus on the remedial programs toward more preventive focus, the government should foster qualified service providers who can participate in the SIB projects through actively searching and supporting the promising candidates that have powerful preventive intervention programs. In addition, we need to develop social investment and finance intermediaries such as Social Finance in the UK.
Third, the government needs to form a favorable environment for the private investors to make investments in SIBs, such as tax incentives for the investments and acknowledging the principal loss in case of SIB failure as grant.
Fourth, we need to develop, classify, and accumulate an extensive database related with the inputs, outputs and outcomes of various sectors of social services for the accurate and objective evaluations of a certain social project. It is necessary to form an association of government, academia, social sector and impact investors in order to develop a common concept on social value, evaluation indicators, and methodologies.
Fifth, it would be helpful to adopt the SIB fund system of the UK which relieves the initial financial burden of social investors in SIBs through the early payment cycle based on simple performance indicators. This system also reduces the administrative costs by simultaneous procurement and commissioning of the multiple SIBs of the same category.
This study is meaningful in the point that it tried a comparative analysis on SIB policies among countries in terms of the role of government, the public and private contract, investment structure and characteristics, and evaluation and payment for success. There were more differences than similarities between the UK and the United States.
It is too early to predict whether Korea may follow the UK model or the US model, or invent a Korean model if SIB settles down as a social policy in Korea. A comparative analysis of SIB policies among countries has a clear limitation in a situation that enough numbers of final results of SIBs were not acquired.
This limitation will be naturally overcome by the following studies in the future when they can gather much more cases and data.