인구감소에 따른 「지방소멸위기지역 지원 특별법(안)」 입법 개선 방안 검토

Abstract

Currently, local governments including rural and fishing villages are in danger of extinction due to the declining population. Many of the local governments are in danger of extinction, and in particular, there are dozens of basic local governments by county with a population of less than 30,000. Such a decrease in population is making it impossible to secure fiscal soundness, causing the limitation of achieving the improvement of resident welfare due to the financial crisis. Local autonomy means that local governments handle autonomous work to improve the welfare of their residents. However, the insolvency of finance resulting from a decrease in population hinders local government's inherent improvement of resident welfare as financial investment is not made for resident welfare. Therefore, the state should support the areas where local governments cannot invest to promote residents' welfare. In the 21st National Assembly, the 「Special Act on Support for Locally Endangered Areas (draft)」 was proposed and various support measures were proposed. This legislation (draft) provides various support measures from the central government, but its content is abstract and declaratively has limitations that do not conform to the rule of law. In addition, it has a limitation of defining simple support measures that do not take into account the aspects of the existence and independence of local governments. Therefore, in this study, we approached the legislation (draft) of the National Assembly prepared to prevent the disappearance of local governments due to population decline in terms of the right to exist and to be independent, and reviewed ways to improve them.