팬데믹과 극장 지원 정책에 관한 메카니즘 설계 = Mechanism design for theater support policy during the pandemic period

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The outbreak of Corona Virus Disease (COVID) 19 gives us a serious disaster globally. The optimism of the early days of the pandemic disappeared, and it is uncertain that it will be completely finished this year in Korea, even though vaccination has already begun.
Pandemic, compared to the other disasters like typhoon or earthquake, has some special characteristics : high uncertainty of prediction and very long period of damage. Main damages of other disasters are concentrated in the early stage. In Korea, the social distancing is still maintained in control level 2. In France, third lockdown has just begun due to increasing corona cases, even though vaccination is going on.
The policy to the corona pandemic, which has extremely high uncertainty not only about the scale but also the duration, as a disaster, can be divided into two parts: ths virus control to overcome the pandemic and the economic policy to reduce economic losses. There is still a lot of controversy to the effectiveness of Korean Government’s virus control. Any way, Korea is better than Japan in COVID 19 control. However, the economic expenditure of Korean government is only 22% compared to the Japan. The Korean government pandemic expenditure is not enough to absorb the damages caused by COVID 19. We do not have enough experiences about the pandemic policies. Moreover, the measurement of the economic impact can not be made in real time, and is inevitably incomplete due to many indirect effects such as global value chain and inter-industrial effects.
Culture and arts are the fields that are directly affected by the physical impact of social distancing during the pandemic session, but their role in economic system is often under-estimated. It seems that many damaged sector by pandemic feel that the government supports are insufficient. There is not exact scheme or method to evaluate the economic damage in times of pandemic and the lack of experiences make solutions much difficult. However, it seems even more difficult in the field of culture. The government's subsidy through the supplementary government budget has already been executed four times in 2020, and the first supplementary budget plan in 2021 was passed by National Assembly in March. If the number of cases per day, which is currently about 500, augments more, the virus control authorities may raise the control level. Naturally, the level of social distancing will be higher than now, and the 6th supplementary government expenditure plan may be prepared. In that case, will the support policy for the culture sector be increased more to cope with the pandemic damage? In reality, it culture sector is not main field during pandemic period, even though social distancing touched severely theaters which is the core of culture economy. Support for the cultural sector by economic authorities was too passive and limited.
In Korea, five pandemic supplementary budget plans have been made at the central government level so far, event though the total amount is largely inferior compared to that of the other OECD countries. Among them, support for culture was mainly focused on employment and freelance support, mainly actors, writers and staffs. In addition, there was subsidy for theater ticking and management support in the culture field, but it is insufficient compared to the size of the pandemic economic damage. We need to take more attention to develop the policy support scheme for the theaters, which is under-estimated in economic policy. Is it impossible to design a direct support mechanism for theaters that suffered significant economic losses due to social distancing?
Estimated by 2020 ticket sales score, the amount of damage of theaters in the field of performing arts such as theater or dance is 258.9 billion won. If we do the same type of work for the movie market, the damage from movie theater sales in 2021 is about 1.4 trillion won. Based on this economic damage of theaters, we can design a theater support mechanism caused by the social distancing of pandemic.
In the control level 2 of the pandemic, the social distancing of theater is to sit space by space. In this case, only 50% of the total audience can enter in the full level. In the case of performing arts such as theater, in general, 70% of audience is usually considered as the break-even point. The gap between the full seat level in social distancing 50% and the break-even point 70% is 20%. Subsidy to this gap is the simplest mechanism to help theaters during the pandemic social distancing. In control level 2.5, the seat distance is doubled. Only 30-40% of audiences can enter depending on the seats placement of each theater. We can design the theater support policy in a similar way. In control level 3, theaters will be closed. In this case, support mechanism could be designed based on production cost, such as labor and fixed costs, rather than ticket sales.
In the same way, you can also design theater support for movie market, which becomes much more complicated than the theater performed in only one theater. In the case of independent films and artistic films, the support rate can be augmented in favor of artistic efforts. If one movie occupies too many theaters, the support rate may be lowered.
Compared to the other OECD countries, Korea used relatively low govermental budget for pandemic economic support. We could say that there is still a room for the additional financial expenditure. And there is not meaningful policy in the cultural sector, especially in the theater support, because social consensus and discussions are not sufficient in this field. If we think the special characteristics of culture sector in national economy, more discussion will be needed to the theater support.