With rapid economic development and urbanization, Korea has experienced numerous developments for last several decades. This phenomenon has caused a dramatic increase in land prices; however it also triggered an income distribution issue as gains gene...
With rapid economic development and urbanization, Korea has experienced numerous developments for last several decades. This phenomenon has caused a dramatic increase in land prices; however it also triggered an income distribution issue as gains generated from such developments were distributed to land owners only. In this regard, Development charge system was adopted to solve this problem by directly restituting development gains and redistributing them to the society. Nevertheless, it has been widely criticized that the System could not appropriately play its role to restitute such development gains. Accordingly, this study aims to identify drawbacks of the current Development charge system and draw out how related policies should be altered to improve the system. Literature research, case study and simulation analysis have been conducted to address the issue.
According to the research, the first reason the current development charge could not secure effectiveness is restriction on the scope of development gains subject to restitution. As an applicable rule, 「Framework Act on the Management of Charges」 is applied to the development charge, leading to certain restrictions. Moreover, other reduction and exemption systems also limit the scope of actual imposition even though development gains were generated. Second reason is omission of gains subject to restitution of development gains. Gains generated from change of land use plan and gains related to construction of buildings are excluded from the list of gains subject to restitution. Third is an underestimated assumption of development gains. Calculated development gains are underestimated due to unreasonable imposition standards used to calculate development gains. Fourth is that it takes a long time to impose the tax due to complexity of an administrative procedure.
In response, first political improvement plan to deal with these problems is to expand and reorganize the scope of development businesses subject to imposition of development charge. As a criteria to examine development businesses subject to imposition, all-inclusive method must be adopted. Also, it needs to establish a major premise that development charge shall be imposed to every business from which development gain is generated by principle. Second is that development gains subject to restitution must be extended so that gains subject to restitution can be consistent with development gains. To be specific, gains generated from the change of land use plan and other gains from constructions that were excluded from tax imposition must be included and subject to restitution. Third, actual development gains must be calculated. To this end, tax imposition system must be differentiated according to the business size. For small size development business, an official land price must be used as a land price, and the standard expense method must be used when calculating development expenses. On the other hand, when it comes to large size development business, a purchase price should be considered as a land price, while the actual expense adjustment must be adopted as a development expense. In order to achieve the objectivity of development charge, imposition criteria must be differentiated according to size of development business, and calculation method of development expense should be divided into two methods according to land price. Fourth, operation process must be improved. Operation process should be specified according to the size of development business. To improve speed of development charge imposition process and shorten the period of the process, it is desirable to simplify the imposition process of development charge for small size development business, while the current system must be maintained for large size business.
The development charge system has been in effective for 27 years. However, it has been criticized for not properly doing its work to restitute development charge due to lack of appropriate laws and system. It is expected that political improvement plans specified in this paper should play a role as a platform to contribute to improving effectiveness of operating system, such as development gains calculation etc., and also to close the loop holes of legal and institutional aspects.
keyword : Development gains restitution, development charge, development business, imposition standards, imposition process