President Lee Jae-myung said on the 3rd, "I believe that in terms of policy or budget allocation, we need to implement regional priority policies beyond just considering local factors to truly restore some balance."
On the same day, President Lee held a press conference at the Blue House's State Guesthouse to mark the 30th day of his inauguration and stated, "There are various tasks for the new government, but one of the core tasks is regional balanced development."
President Lee also said, "I instructed at the Cabinet meeting to create a kind of weighting table based on regions when deciding on policies or allocating budgets." He elaborated, "It involves combining various indexes such as distance from the metropolitan area and distance from local major cities to provide weighted budgets by region."
He added, "In the future, I am also considering a method to mandate the analysis of the impact on regional balanced development by automatically multiplying when allocating grant-in-aid (non-earmarked tax) or SOC budgets to promote balanced development."
The president also noted, "The creation of new cities related to metropolitan area concentration has become a recent topic of debate," and pointed out that, "Due to a shortage of dwellings, there is a proposal to damage green belts to create new cities for supply, but from a local standpoint, the concentration in the metropolitan area causes housing issues, and creating more new cities will further lead to this concentration."
He remarked, "We will have to make a decision at some point from two perspectives," adding, "What has already been decided cannot be changed. However, we must review whether to create additional ones in terms of sustainable growth and development strategy," implying a negative outlook on further new city supplies.