South Korea to begin preliminary assessment on proposed bills

Park Sang-chul, the incoming chairman of the National Assembly Research Service [Photo by Han Joo-hyung]

The National Assembly in South Korea has announced its plans to establish a scientific legislative analysis center, which will support preliminary legislative impact assessments on bills proposed by lawmakers.

According to the National Assembly on Monday, the center will be created under the National Assembly Research Service. It will focus on conducting scientific analyses of the legislative impact of proposed bills. Both the ruling and opposition parties have put forth a bill to make legislative impact analysis mandatory for lawmakers’ bills.

National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin-pyo has been briefed on the proposal and instructed to promote it actively. The center aims to begin pilot operations in the second half of this year, employing around 20 staff members and expects to be in full operation by 2025. The primary mission will involve providing scientific methodologies for analyzing parliamentary bills and data for issue analysis. It takes inspiration from the European Union’s Joint Research Center (JRC), an independent organization that offers science and knowledge services to the EU to inform policy-making.

The decision to introduce the center was prompted by the increasing number of parliamentary bills, particularly regulatory ones. The number of parliamentary bills has risen from 16,729 in the 19th National Assembly to 21,557 in the 21st National Assembly even before its term ended. As many as 97 out of every 100 bills are parliamentary bills.

While government bills require a minimum of five to seven months for legislation due to the mandatory legislative impact analysis, parliamentary bills do not have this requirement. They can be immediately submitted to a standing committee of the National Assembly for discussion after being introduced. Many laws have been enacted without sufficient analysis of their social and economic effects. The case of the ‘Tada Ban’ serves as an example.

Park Sang-chul, the incoming chairman of the National Assembly Research Service, stressed the need to institutionalize legislative impact analysis for parliamentary bills, which currently lack a pre-existing impact analysis system. “Law is not strictly speaking the domain of politics, but of science,” Park said, emphasizing that laws subjected to the legislative impact analysis system will have socially and scientifically verified evaluations.

Park highlighted the case of ride-hailing service operator Tada, recently acquitted by the Supreme Court, to illustrate the need for institutionalizing legislative impact analysis. Park believes that if a proper legislative impact assessment had been conducted, the Tada law imposed by politicians would not have incurred such significant social costs. He argues that a well-drafted law could have prevented the massive social costs of over 1,000 trillion won ($765.6 billion).

Regarding the nursing law, Park stated that controversy could have been reduced if the legislation’s impact on doctors, nursing assistants, nurses and the public had been thoroughly analyzed. He added that analyzing the effects of law implementation in the years following its enactment would enable efficient alternative suggestions, including amendments when problems arise. Park emphasized the crucial role of accumulating and storing data at the center.

However, there may be conflicts of interest between legislative impact assessors and political parties seeking to expedite bills. Park asserted that the independence and neutrality of legislative impact analysis are of utmost importance and will be strictly upheld. Nevertheless, for bills requiring swift processing, such as measures against charter fraud, exceptional provisions can be made to minimize delays in the legislative process.