Nowadays, the demand for welfare services is rising because of low fertility, entry into an aging society, population decrease, and rapid socioeconomic changes, which has increased the need for financial expansion of local governments. However, the ta...
Nowadays, the demand for welfare services is rising because of low fertility, entry into an aging society, population decrease, and rapid socioeconomic changes, which has increased the need for financial expansion of local governments. However, the tax sources of local governments are limited due to the structure of local taxes, and there is a limitation that the governments cannot establish new tax sources. In particular, while autonomous districts of metropolitan governments should meet the demand for welfare services solely with registration license and property taxes, the property tax, which takes up a large portion, leads to gaps of tax revenue among the autonomous districts because its assessment standard is real estate.
To resolve the financial imbalance resulting from the lack of local governments’ financial resources, the central government and metropolitan governments are implementing vertical fiscal equalization schemes; specifically, the former is implementing local allocation tax and state subsidy scheme for cities and gun, and the latters are implementing financial grant and fiscal compensation scheme for autonomous districts. However, local governments are suffering from chronic lack of finance, and financial gaps among local governments are not resolved.
On the other hand, in 2008, to resolve problems such as gaps of welfare services and hindrance to social integration caused by financial imbalances among the autonomous districts in Seoul Special City, the city introduced the ‘property tax sharing scheme’, which was a horizontal fiscal equalization scheme of the method that commonly taxed for non-housing property tax, which took up the largest portion of registration license and property taxes, which were the tax sources of the autonomous districts, and was closely related to the administrative services of the metropolitan government, and equally distributed to the 25 autonomous districts in Seoul. As a result, the gaps among the districts were considerably mitigated.
Accordingly, after examining the background and effects of the introduction of the property tax sharing scheme of Seoul Special City, this paper aims to investigate the gaps among the autonomous districts through social indicators of the six major metropolitan cities (i.e., Incheon, Deajeon, Busan, Gwangju, Deagu, and Ulsan) except for Seoul, and to present policy and academic implications regarding the necessity and horizontal financial effects of the property tax sharing scheme.
To this end, according to the results of examining the gaps among the autonomous districts based on the data of the urban master plan and the plan for adjustment of housing environment of the six metropolitan cities, the levels of the gaps were similar to those at the time when Seoul introduced the property tax sharing scheme, but they have greatly been resolved, as the property tax sharing scheme was introduced. Thus, it was identified that there were positive effects of the scheme.