The Korea Local Administration Review

This study, focusing on the Chungcheongbuk-do local government employees,identifies the pattern of their transfer within the province and what impact thecurrent pattern exerts on different (urban vs. non-urban) types of localgovernments. The network analysis reveals that the province government andlocal governments with urban infrastructures get many inflows of publicemployees that transfer from governments located in rural areas. Such anunbalance in the human resource transfer structure arises from the presence ofthe examination for transfer from local (especially non-urban) to the provincegovernment and government employees’strong personal motivation for urbanliving. A series of in-depth interviews with personnel managers in non-urbanlocal governments found that those governments have difficulties in humanresource management due to more exits exceeding inflows. The unbalancedtransfer between the province/urban-area and rural-area governmentsprovokes a variety of problems including: unavoidable vacancies in importanttasks and positions, additional work loads laid to former colleagues, exits ofexperienced people, administrative costs for employing and trainingunexperienced applicants, relative deprivation feeling (only some selectedpeople are allowed to transfer to urban governments), andintra-/inter-governmental conflicts. Overall we consider this transfer pattern as“internal turnover” unbalanced between the province/urban and ruralgovernments rather than a fair exchange of human resources among publicagencies. Without any strategy, negative results made by the internal turnoverwould get more serious.
□ Keywords: Local government employees, internal turnover, network analysis