Basic Report

   Population of almost all small municipalities in rural area in Korea has been decreasing, which drives them to be in trouble for public service provision and delivery. In particular, the facts that population of the aged over 65 has increased while that of young people has decreased make it worse. Also fiscal stress results from revenue decrease due to mainly population decline. Small municipalities need to operate and manage organizational units and public personnels based on local characteristics and circumstances and to innovate public service system to meet service demands at the same time.This study tries to explore significant approaches to improve administrative efficiency of small municipalities in rural areas. In fact, small municipalities under 50,000 population face persisting population decrease. During recent decade, particularly ratio of the aged has swiftly increased but the population of under 15 has rapidly declined. Despite of these changes, volume of organizational units and public officials are rarely changed, which results in worse case that most of small municipalities are not capable of paying salary and compensation for their employees with their own revenues and thus deteriorate their fiscal conditions. Nonetheless, those municipalities provide and deliver the same public services in terms of service types and volumes with the same service provision system.Based upon research findings, the report proposes some approaches to enhance administrative efficiency: integrating of multiple municipalities, reforming organizational structures based on local service demands, contracting-out of service delivery to adjacent municipalities or provincial government in case of low degree of service demands, building-up administrative association across adjacent municipalities and administrating several functions and services to satisfy economy of scale, and increasing linkage between government and private bodies to vitalize citizen participation and local self-government.