Since land is a kind of public goods not a thing made by a human being, it is natural that development gains from land must be redeemed. By means of this redemption process, it is necessary to prevent privatization of an unearned income derived from p...
Since land is a kind of public goods not a thing made by a human being, it is natural that development gains from land must be redeemed. By means of this redemption process, it is necessary to prevent privatization of an unearned income derived from public investment, to control a speculation and to promote stabilization of land price. In particular, Korean society has a strong desire to possess the land, and the high-income bracket's ownership of the excessive land made it possible for the actual purchaser to buy the land. Moreover, such property-related issues are mutually connected, and thus there is a vicious circle of which unbalance of demand and supply triggers the rising of the land price, such rising of price fosters speculations, and it causes the rising of the land price again. Therefore, it is necessary to establish the fundamental solution.
Although the range of restitution of development gains has been changed according to the social and economic conditions, it is likely that national consensus among people was established somewhat which any profit directly or indirectly derived from development project was made irrespective of efforts of land owner and thus should be redeemed as an unearned income. The government also enacted ‘the Restitution of Development Gains Act’ in 1989 to solve the problems of speculative investment in real estate and privatization of development gains caused in the course of growth-oriented policy and revised it several times. In addition, it enacted ‘the Act on restitution of excess gains of reconstruction” in May 2006 to reinforce the regulations related to reconstruction under the consideration that reconstruction business would disturb the real estate market and cause a bubble of real estate price.
However, such various measures of the government are lack of consistency and efficiency due to its frequent changes, and so it is necessary to establish an appropriate plan for fundamental improvement. As a part of such improvement schemes, an effective system for restitution of development gains shall be made which can cover all concepts of development gains and furthermore a proper program to improve the sluggish results of restitution of development allotment. Specifically, such efforts are as follows:
First, it is necessary to establish the redemption system covering all kinds of definitions (from the narrowest one to the broad one) of development gains. In addition, in order to establish the appropriateness of the level of redemption, it is recommended to introduce the differential redemption system of development gains and expand the scope subject to redemption, which shall be determined considering the public interest of applicable business.
Finally, in order to improve the efficiency of redemption system, it is required to operate the system more stably and enhance the possibility of prediction of the policy. Also for overcoming the public's opposition, it is desired to reform the current system to avoid the double imposition.