지방자치단체 환경예산제도의 발전방향 연구 -환경분야 국고보조금 제도를 중심으로-

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In most countries the local governments are more directly engaged in the environmental protection than the central/federal government. According to the statistic ?Environmental Protection Expenditures and Revenues (EPER)? by the Bank of Korea, the environmental expenditures of local governments amount to 6.5 trillion won, about 82 % of 7.7 trillion won, total environmental expenditures in the public sector. Therefore it is necessary to secure a stable financial basis for local environmental expenditures and stimulate a efficient allocation of scarce local financial resources in order to enhance the country?s overall environmental performance. Because the financial situation of most local governments in Korea are very tight, many local environmental projects (sewerage, incinerator, land?fill, etc.) are in a significant part financed by federal conditional environmental grants. This research report has two objectives. Firstly, it will provide a systematic summary of the local environmental expenditures which is aims to, Secondly, it will review the existing federal environmental grants and suggest policy options to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the grants. This report has collected, classified, and summarized the expenditure and revenue data in key environmental sectors (air quality, water quality, waste, nature conservation, etc.) from 2002 to 2004 for 7 metropolitan cities and 9 provinces. The data are also classified and analyzed for the sub?localities; cities and counties of the province and autonomous districts of the metropolitan city. The metropolitan city governments expend the most part of environmental budget on waste and wastewater treatment, while the expenditure for nature conservation has increased significantly in recent years. The environmental expenditure of autonomous districts is concentrated on the waste treatment, because most activities for environmental protection are in the metropolitan area carried out by the city government, while the district government is almost only responsible for waste collection. This is in striking contrast to the situation in the province. Here the cities and counties are major player in public environmental activities, while the province government is more coordinator than playing actor. The environmental expenditures of the province government are not only relatively small, but also more than 50% of them occur in nature protection. The environmental expenditures were partly financed from dependent resources (conditional environmental grants); 34.8% for cities, 61.4% for counties in 2004. In order to examine how different the environmental expenditure is induced by financing sources (general revenue/unconditional grants, conditional environmental grants, conditional non?environmental grants), we have applied a panel data method and found that the induced expenditures in environmental area by general revenue/unconditional grants or conditional non?environmental grants are very limited. This result makes clear that the conditional environmental grants are required as a stable financial basis. But it was also observed a ?deflective effect? of the conditional environmental grants that is larger for financially weak localities. Based on these results and in?depth interviews with officials of local governments, the report has suggested following policy options to improve the conditional environmental grants system: Firstly, it is proposed to move to a block grant system, which shall classify and group the existing too specific environmental grants and give local governments more flexibility in using grants. Secondly, it is required to improve the allowance criteria of environmental grants in oder to consider both efficiency (spill?over effect) and equity (financial weakness). Thirdly, the central government has to establish a coherent system of evaluation and feedback in order to stimulate an efficient expenditure of local governments.