Impact assesment on the government subsidies and regulations for public housing programs in Korea

Abstract

The housing policy of the Korean government before the 2000s mainly focused on solving quantitative aspect of housing problem. Recently the housing supply ratio of Korea has reached over 100%, and Korea does not suffer housing shortage problem any more. However, qualitative aspect of housing problem, in particular, unequal distribution of housing still persists. According to the outcome of the ``Census of Population and Housing in 2000,`` the ratio of households residing in housing, which is below the minimum housing standard, reached 23% of all households, and the ratio of households with a single room is around 10% of all households. In order to ease unequal housing consumption between social classes, the Korean government has managed various kinds of housing related programs such as government subsidies, residential environment improvement projects, and a variety types of public housing supply. The government subsidies and supports for residential environment improvement projects are directly delivered to beneficiary. For the public housing supply, the benefits from government finance, housing site and taxation support policies are provided to housing business, which is to be delivered to tenants with sales price and rental fee regulations. The impact from the government support and regulatory policies on public housing programs must be given to their applicable target group. It is necessary to assess how well the effects of the government policies are delivered to the initially planned target group (effectiveness), how much amount of government support is provided to tenants (efficiency), and whether the government support is distributed to tenants equally considering their income level(equity). Therefore, it is required to develop an impact assessment system of the government support and regulatory policies on public housing programs. At the present, there exist no sustainable system to monitor and evaluate the impact of these support policies. It is...