A First Last Call for "Absurd Regulation"

Absurd regulation.

Ring any bells?

If so (and if you happen to be a Korean national) then you’re in luck: the window on Korea’s first “Absurd Regulation Contest” (황당규제 공모전) is still open. Contestants have until this Thursday, April 20 (KST), to submit entries.

At stake: anything from a KRW 5,000 coffee coupon (100 randomly-selected entrants) to a KRW 1,000,000 “Onnuri” gift certificate and an award from the Minister of the Office of Government Policy Coordination (OPC) for the grand prize winner.

That — and the chance to make life better for everyone through better regulation.

What exactly does the government have in mind here?

The OPC’s press package provides one answer.

Says Minister Bang Mun-gyu of the effort: “Regulation plays a role in bringing order and safety to our lives. But poorly made regulation is a source of discomfort — and even on occasion absurdity.” And that’s why “we ask for broad interest and participation to ensure that this contest seizes the opportunity to resolve the unreasonable regulations that remain in everyday life, and to improve citizens’ lives a notch.”

The accompanying categories and examples underscore the OPC’s focus on lived regulation.

• Under the heading of “regulations removed from reality: those that do not reflect real conditions” is the example of the baffling requirement, since resolved, that “in a hair salon or barber shop, only those holding a cosmetologist’s license can wash hair.”
• Then there are “outdated regulations: those that have not kept up with technology or the environment,” illustrated by a rule that “apartment [complexes] of 150 units or more must use only CCTV security cameras.” Here too, the fix was simple: “network security cameras also allowed.”
• Finally, the OPC outlines a category of “excessive regulations: those that, in daily life, feel like just too much.” For example: the longstanding rule that “the photos in residency registration cards must show ears and eyebrows,” also since reformed to “delete the line item requiring the exposure of ears and eyebrows.”

OPC Minister Bang’s other comments hammer the point home. As the goal of the contest is to get “citizens to actively improve — through direct participation — the regulations intimately tied up with their real lives,” the contest is structured to have “citizens directly pointing out the regulations, experienced in daily life, that are far removed from reality, and suggesting reforms” (emphasis OPC’s).

If these examples feel like low-hanging fruit, then politics suggest another explanation.

As President Yoon Suk Yeol, who campaigned on a platform of sweeping regulatory reform, approaches one year in office, his administration’s progress on these fronts is naturally a subject of increased interest.

Here, a contest like this delivers clear results. It produces the data Yoon’s administration can use to target and reform specific instances of “excessive regulation” with precision, justification, and guaranteed impact. It lays out a concrete timeline — for collection, review, voting, and announcements, if not for actual reforms (which, to be fair, are not easily scheduled). It provides colorful headlines in a tough news cycle.

By focusing on the most quotidian examples of red tape and designing — both graphically and linguistically — for a new generation, the OPC gets a wider segment of society on board with the idea of resolving “outdated” or “absurd” regulation. And by having citizens identify, propose, and vote on these examples, Yoon’s administration not only reaffirms its regulatory reform program as a mandate, but also recasts it as a win-win — for people and administration alike.

Yet a narrowly political read obscures some of the most interesting features of this competition.

It is unclear, for one thing, whether or to what extent contestants will share the OPC’s picture of “everyday” regulation. The categories, after all, are quite broad: at odds with reality, outdated, excessive. And the criterion is only that these hindrances present themselves in daily life. Plenty of more complex regulations currently contested in Korean society fit the bill.

The OPC, which just this week released, with the Korea Society for Regulatory Studies, a “comprehensive review and diagnosis of [the administration’s] regulatory reform performance in 2022 from the objective and neutral standpoint of citizen experts,” is well aware of this, and well-positioned to make use of wider pleas for regulatory reform. But what about the suggestions less in line with administration policy? Will all contest entries be made public? How, beyond the general criteria, will the “relevant ministries and offices” reviewing the suggestions decide on “excellent entries” upon which the public is to vote? Will there be a next iteration of this contest if, in a year’s time, the winning entries are yet to be resolved by law?

It is clear, for another thing, that the OPC had some real fun with this competition.

The contest homepage, “www.황당규제.com,” (effectively “absurdregulation.com”) for instance, redirects to the OPC’s Regulation Information Portal “better.go.kr”: absurd regulation encountered in private life resolves through better government. More Easter eggs abound in the site’s subpages: in a nod to both the vexing scripting of Korean websites and the subject at hand alike, the resources page URL filepath begins with “hd.anabsurdity” (hd presumably the abbreviation for “hwangdang,” or “absurd”), and ends with “.laf”.

Finally, the structure and timing of the contest provide a chance to take stock not just of the Yoon administration’s “regulatory innovation” program, but also of our understanding of regulatory reform in Korea more generally.

Here, it is useful to keep two items of received wisdom in mind.

The first — oft-repeated but still little-known — is that the contemporary era of regulatory reform in Korea, under the 1998 Basic Act on Administrative Regulations, began with a particular kind of bang. As part of the country’s response to the IMF Crisis, President Kim Dae-jung’s newly-established Regulatory Reform Committee eliminated over 50% of the country’s regulations in the 1998-1999 period alone.

This, for better or worse, has set the standard for Korean “regulatory reform” in the eyes of both insiders and of outsiders like the OECD, whose rankings of Korea in its “Indicators of Product Market Regulation” remain a subject of fixation among the country’s regulatory reformers. But it is not, as has been noted for two decades now, without its problems. As a critical review had already pointed by 2005, Koreans have found the government’s culling-focused approach less than satisfactory for a number of reasons — not least of which was the fact that, in going after the low-hanging fruit in bulk, the reform programs tended to leave the thorniest regulatory problems untouched. Sound familiar?

The second is the equation of deregulation with (strictly) conservative party policy orthodoxy in Korea. In a 2022 paper, OPC staffer Kim Gi-man and Chungnam National University Prof. Bae Gwan-pyo challenge this view, pointing out that, over the past two decades, “deregulation has continued in Korea despite multiple [transfers of] power between progressive and conservative parties.” The reason for this, they argue, is systemic: in a stubbornly low-growth environment, the government has continued to remove roadblocks on the one hand and to develop the infrastructure of innovative technology on the other within the same framework it initially devised as a recipe for spurring growth — regulatory reform under the Basic Act and coordinated by the Committee. (Others have pointed out how this framework became broadly embedded throughout government and society).

The participation in, responses to, and results of this month’s novel “Absurd Regulation Contest” should provide additional data against which to test this hypothesis.

So, well, last call!