Up until now, 29 states in the USA have adopted their own Development Impact Fee (DIF) Acts. Many scholars indicate that DIFs have been recognized as a financial policy tool closer to environmental policy than developmental policy. Namely, DIFs are on...
Up until now, 29 states in the USA have adopted their own Development Impact Fee (DIF) Acts. Many scholars indicate that DIFs have been recognized as a financial policy tool closer to environmental policy than developmental policy. Namely, DIFs are one of institutions that stakeholders pursuing environment conservation prefer. Based on these perspectives, this study targets to empirically scrutinize why counties as local governments more actively implement development impact fees. For this, the study constructs a final equation model, which is composed of six hypotheses, and estimates each hypothesis. The final statistical findings reveal that counties with many wealthy residents and many homeowners as interest groups implement more DIFs. These empirical findings support that residents in high socioeconomic status prefer environmental policy to developmental policy. These days, Korea has been a democratic country embracing a dynamic circumstance. In this current situation, scholars need to analyze explanatory power of interest groups in studying mechanisms of the policy process in Korea. On the other hand, the author proposes to compare these research results with studies analyzing counties in other states to confirm these research results’ generalizability.