Bureaucrats and Budgets in South Korea: Evidence for Hometown Favoritism

Abstract

This article presents evidence that high-ranking public officials in the Ministry of Strategy and Finance in South Korea affect local budget allocation. Applying a regression model on a uniquely constructed panel dataset, I found that the growth rate of the per-capita National Subsidy, which is a subcomponent of the national budget susceptible to discretionary behaviors, increases approximately 7 percent in the hometowns of high-ranking bureaucrats. To validate these findings and address causality, I conducted a battery of auxiliary robustness checks, which yielded confirmatory results. This study also found that enhancing transparency in the budget allocation system can alleviate concerns about bureaucratic hometown favoritism, providing suggestive evidence of bureaucrats’ rent-seeking behaviors without government transparency.

What determines the vote-seeking behavior of legislators in South Korea?

“…Several control variables are incorporated into the analysis. First, in consideration of the influential role held by local government governors in distributing intergovernmental transfers from central governments to local administrations [ 21 , 24 ], we introduce a binary variable denoting the party affiliation alignment between legislators and the governor (referred to as Si-Jang / Do-Ji-Sa in Korean). A value of 1 signifies alignment within the same party, while 0 indicates a mismatch in party affiliation.…”

Effects of electoral margins on party loyalty in the roll call votes: Evidence from the 20th National Assembly in South Korea

“…2.For recent empirical research concerning pork-centric politics in South Korea, refer to the following examples: Horiuchi and Lee (2008), Hong and Park (2016), Kang (2016), and Kim (2021) for the case of president, Kim et al (2020a), Jung (2021) for the case of MPs, Kim and Park (2021), Ha and Lee (2022), and Jung (forthcoming) for the case of bureaucrats.…”