새만금간척사업의 경제적 타당성 논쟁

Debate on Economic Validity of Sae-Man-Keum Land Reclamation Project

Whether to continue the Saemankum project or not has developed into a national hot controversy. The project, which aims at a large scale land reclamation, was temporarily halted in 1999 because of strong oppositions raised on the ground that it would cause serious water pollution and destroy huge natural seashore wet land. Responding to these oppositions, the Korean Government organized a committee which is supposed to evaluate the validity of the project. One of the duties of the committee is to comb through economic validity of the project. In fact, economic validity of the project was evaluated in 1988 already shortly before the project was actually carried out. At that time, however, the evaluation failed to take into account the social costs associated with the water pollution and the loss of natural wet land. It was widely claimed that theses social costs would make the project far from economic validity. After more than one year of evaluation, the committee failed to reach any conclusion on whether the Saemankuem project is economically valid or not, because opinions were sharply splitted among the economists who participated in the evaluation. The whole process of the economic evaluation was the one of heated debates among those economists. Most of the debate was concentrated on identification and quantification of the benefits of the project. One of the main purposes of this paper is to bring into relief the main points of the heated debates to provide the economist with teaching and research materials for cost-benefit analysis.