The Korea Local Administration Review

This study aims to analyze factors affecting the local government’s decision to provide universal relief aid to all residents. To this end, I used logistic regression analysis to study local governments’ external and internal environmental factors affecting universal relief aid adoption. The external environmental factor was the horizontal pressure to adopt the universal relief aid from adjacent regions that had already chosen the universal relief aid policy. The internal environmental factors were fiscal, socioeconomic, and political factors. As a result of the analysis, the adjacent regional effect was found to affect to adopt the universal relief positively; in addition, it was found that the case of belonging to the ruling party of the head of the local government had a positive effect on the decision to provide universal relief aid; among the fiscal aspects, the higher debt ratio had a negative effect on the universal relief adoption, while the increased fiscal independence and the higher non-subsidy project ratio had a positive impact; the influence of the net annual surplus ratio and mandatory expenditure ratio had no statistical significance.