Does Healthy City Expand the Local Government Resources?: Focusing on the Budgets for Environment, Social Welfare, Public Health, and Transportation

Abstract

A healthy city is a city that keeps expanding its resources towards making physical and socioeconomic environments health-friendly. Korea’s program of healthy cities has been developed in areas of health behavior improvement, health equity, hygiene and environment improvement, and the improvement of walking and biking environments. This study aimed to determine whether introducing a healthy city project within the local government increased the budget for public health, environment, social welfare, and transportation. A panel dataset was constructed from various sources for 229 local governments from 2008 to 2018 on variables such as the budget amount, the percentage of residents 65 or older, the percentage of the recipients of the national basic living security, the congruence of political parties between the mayor and the majority of the city council, the majority party of the city council, the amount of local tax, financial independence index, and the starting year of a healthy city. A fixed-effect panel analysis was used to ascertain the effect of a healthy city project on local budgets. Results showed that healthy cities increased transportation budgets in rural areas. However, healthy cities were not related to budgets in other areas. The multi-sectoral governance for the budget planning of healthy city and financial decentralization of local governments are necessary for local governments to expand their budgets for specialized programs such as healthy cities.