The Korea Local Administration Review

This study is to find out the current state of elderly welfare expenditure and efforts to improve the welfare for the elderly by using ‘policy commitment’ in Sejong city. Policy commitment refers to local government’s financial supports to specific field on their own funding program. Previous studies have attempted to utilize ‘financial capacity’ of local governments, however, it is necessary to focus on sellf-fudning program due to an environment with high fiscal-dependence on the central government in Korea. This study examines local-level eldelry welfare expenditure, self-funding welfare programs, support method and detaied programs for old people in 2021 with Sejong and administrative, socio-economic, and normative reference groups. The results are follows: firstly, Sejong’s financial capacity is relatively high compared to 16 regional local government(administrative groups), furthermore, social expenditure and self-funding welfare programs for the elderly have steadily increased in Sejong; secondly, compared to the socio-economic and normative groups incluidng Dajeon city, Yuseong-gu, Seoul city, and Ganam-gu, policy commitment for the elderly wefare is ranked in the middle; thirdly, self-funding welfare programs for old people in Sejong is largely funded in-cash, and there was a big difference in policy commitment by detais in the elderly programs self-funded. To be specific, Sejong city supports a lot of ‘funeral facilities’, and ‘respect/social integration’ after ‘care service’, even though reference groups focus on ‘social participation’ or ‘job projects’ for the elderly. The result indicates that Sejong city needs to adjust self-funding programs for detailed area of the elderly welfare, and attempts to benchmark other programs for senior job-project of reference groups in order to meets various welfare needs of the elderly in Sejong.