ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the contemporary status of Korean local autonomy from legal, political, administrative, and fiscal perspectives. It focuses on Korean local government finance, and special attention is centered on raising local revenues, vertical and horizontal fiscal imbalances, local financial self-support, and intergovernmental fiscal transfers. The chapter shows that intergovernmental relations (IGR) in Korea are transitioning from local dependency to intergovernmental interdependency. It describes the distinctive periods and shifts in relations between the central and local governments. Local autonomy in the Republic of Korea is an IGR issue that exemplifies nearly all of the several variables specified in Norton's panorama of explanations. In 1995, the Republic of Korea held local elections and, for the first time in a half-century, both executive heads and council members of local governments were popularly elected. It was a pivotal event in the history of Korean intergovernmental relations.
