Jeju Island's Available Budget Expected to Decrease by Half Next Year

[Asia Economy Honam Reporting Headquarters Reporter Park Chang-won] Jeju Island is facing an emergency as its available budget is estimated to drop to half compared to this year's main budget ahead of next year's budget formulation.

While the available budget reached 1 trillion won when formulating this year's main budget, next year's budget is expected to be around 450 billion to 500 billion won.

According to Jeju Island on the 28th, revenue such as transaction tax and local income tax has noticeably decreased this year.

Even the leisure tax was initially set at 59.2 billion won in the main budget, but was reduced by 20 billion won in the recent supplementary budget. Due to the downturn in the real estate market and halted transactions, the decrease in acquisition and registration taxes is even more severe.

In particular, the province's financial diagnosis expected local taxes to decrease by about 11 billion won compared to last year, but if the recent trend continues, the decrease is expected to reach about 100 billion won.

Not only local taxes but also national taxes are sharply decreasing, so Jeju Island expects the allocation tax assigned to Jeju to decrease accordingly.

Considering this comprehensive situation, while the province estimated the general accounting budget to decrease from about 4.97 trillion won in 2020 to 4.7 trillion won next year by cutting about 250 billion won during the financial diagnosis, there are concerns that it may decrease by an additional 200 to 250 billion won.

A Jeju Island official said, “Due to the real estate market contraction and the COVID-19 situation, the revenue cliff is expected to be beyond imagination,” and added, “Until the financial conditions improve, unnecessary and non-urgent budgets should be filtered out as much as possible.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.