Gov’t takes step to reform regulations related to livelihoods

[Photo by Yonhap]

The South Korean government announced several measures aimed at reforming regulations related to the public’s livelihoods on Monday, including scrapping the Mobile Device Distribution Improvement Act, which prohibits mobile carriers from providing excessive discounts or illegal subsidies to customers, and the mandatory closures for large supermarkets on public holidays.

The announcement was made during a government-public debate led by Government Policy Coordination Minister Bang Ki-seon on Monday, the fifth in a series of debates on livelihood issues.

“Promoting competition via regulatory reforms to genuinely lower prices is a far better way to take care of people’s livelihoods than blindly injecting fiscal resources,” Bang said.

But all these measures require amendments to relevant laws and necessitate the cooperation of the National Assembly.

Under the measures, the government will remove the current principle under the Distribution Industry Development Act, which requires big-box retailers to close their businesses twice a month on public holidays. An increasing number of local governments, including in Daegu, North Gyeongsang Province, have recently switched their mandatory closure days from public holidays to weekdays, and the government intends to spread this trend via legislative amendments. It also plans to allow online early morning deliveries, which were banned from midnight to 10 a.m.

The government will also reduce the burden of telecommunication costs on citizens by abolishing the Mobile Device Distribution Improvement Act a decade after its introduction. The abolition of this law is expected to lead to competition among telecommunications companies for subsidies as the cap on handset subsidies will disappear, resulting in lower communication costs.

In a related development, President Yoon Suk Yeol instructed his top aides to “look for ways to practically lower mobile device prices even before the abolition of the mobile device act by promoting competition between service providers” during a meeting at his Yongsan office on the same day.

The government will also not apply the current fixed book price system to webtoons and web novels to lower the burden on consumers, considering the nature of online books that are consumed quickly. The government also plans to increase the discount rate for small bookstores in the belief that keeping the discount ceiling the same as large bookstores at 15 percent would make it difficult for small bookstores to survive.