"Can't Prove the Reason for Regulation? Then Change It!"... Busan City Establishes Regulatory Innovation Plan for This Year

Expert Opinions Gathered, This Year's Plan Finalized
Four Key Tasks and Thirteen Detailed Action Plans to Be Implemented

Busan City (Mayor Park Hyungjun) is accelerating the implementation of region-specific regulatory innovation.

On the 26th, Busan City announced that it has established the "2025 Regulatory Innovation Implementation Plan" with the goal of driving regional development and alleviating burdens on people's livelihoods, and will take the lead in promoting regulatory innovation at a rapid pace.

Previously, the city gathered opinions from experts in various fields at the 2nd Regulatory Reform Committee meeting for 2025, held on the 24th, and formulated this year's plan.

This year, Busan will focus on four main tasks and thirteen detailed action plans: ▲ Resolving central government regulations that affect local issues ▲ Enhancing the public's perception of regulatory innovation ▲ Overhauling registered local regulations ▲ Strengthening regulatory innovation capabilities.

The detailed action plans include: ▲ Promoting improvements to region-specific and central government regulations ▲ Operating an on-site regulatory reporting center ▲ Strengthening the responsibility system for proving the necessity of local regulations ▲ Eliminating shadow and behavioral regulations ▲ Enhancing expertise in regulatory impact analysis of local ordinances ▲ Intensively managing the implementation of accepted regulatory improvement tasks.

The city will focus on resolving difficulties faced by regional projects due to delays or suspensions in consultations with central government ministries and will collaborate with central ministries to review major issues that were not improved last year, aiming to increase the actual acceptance rate of regulatory improvements.

To intensively improve regulations affecting people's livelihoods, the city will operate an "on-site regulatory reporting center" as a field-oriented communication channel and will focus on resolving issues through expert consultations and in-depth discussions. In addition, regulations directly affecting citizens' lives?such as licensing and support standards for small businesses, self-employed individuals, and youth?will be improved to reduce burdens on citizens.

For corporate regulatory innovation, the city will work to strengthen cooperation by expanding the organization of the dedicated Corporate Support Division.

Additionally, to enhance regulatory innovation capabilities, the city plans to develop and distribute a manual for regulatory impact analysis of local ordinances to strengthen staff expertise in regulatory affairs.

At this Regulatory Reform Committee meeting, the city launched the first responsibility system for proving the necessity of regulations this year to overhaul hidden local regulations that act as obstacles to people's livelihoods, and reviewed various tasks such as relaxing licensing standards that may burden citizens and businesses.

The responsibility system for proving the necessity of regulations is a demand-driven regulatory improvement approach in which the responsible official must provide justification for maintaining a regulation; if unable to do so, the regulation must be improved.

The committee reviewed and decided to promote improvements such as ▲ Relaxing insurance subscription requirements to reduce burdens on investment companies ▲ Clarifying regulations to prevent duplicate environmental impact assessments for buildings.

Lee Joonseung, Deputy Mayor for Administrative Affairs of Busan City, said, "This is a time when bold regulatory innovation is more important than ever, so we will continue to pursue substantial regulatory reforms to help revitalize people's livelihoods and boost the local economy."

Busan Deputy Mayor Junseung Lee held the 2nd Regulatory Reform Committee meeting for 2025 on the 24th.

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